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Unexplained Accent

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"More inexplicable is Andy Richter's work as a limousine driver with sinister connections to music piracy rackets. He is given an accent, from where I could not guess, although I could guess why: At a story conference, the filmmakers looked in despair at his pointless character and said, 'What the hell, maybe we should give him an accent.'"

When a character has an accent that cannot be explained by the setting. It's often wildly dissonant with the accents of other characters who have the same background. Similar to Not Even Bothering with the Accent, except that the actor doesn't have the accent either — there's simply no good reason for it. It can be explained as being for humor or to take advantage of a cultural stereotype for characterisation, but sometimes it happens for no good reason at all. If an accent is because a character is from a real life place, but uses an accent for a different real life place that is a Misplaced Accent.

This is very common in audiobooks because narrators who are faced with creating dozens of unique character voices will often use regional accents to differentiate characters even when they're supposed to be from the same area.

Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping is not this trope because normally the characters speak with setting-appropriate accents but lapses.

See also What the Hell Is That Accent? (when the resulting accent is confusing), Vot Ocksent? (when they deny they have an accent despite having a thick one) and Unintelligible Accent (when their accent is too thick to understand).


Examples

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    Advertising 
  • Played for Laughs in one CN City bumper, where Dexter, who has a heavy accent of unidentifiable origin while his family is American, is implied to talk like he does in part because he has a speech impediment.
  • One GEICO ad featured the thickly-accented Gecko character speaking about Americans in a vague way that made it unclear if he considered himself one or not. A character asks "Where are you even from?" and the ad... abruptly ends.

    Anime & Manga 
  • In the Mexican dub of the first Captain Tsubasa anime series, the character Munemasa Katagiri speaks with a ridiculous faux-German accent that no other character is shown using. Even more jarring considering that he's Japanese while actual German chars speak normally.
  • In the Code Geass English dub, while no other Britannian has such an accent, Lloyd and to a lesser extent Schneizel speak with sort of campy British accents. Likely, it just might be the voice actors hamming it up. It should be noted, even though Britannia originated from Britain, Britannia's territory is mostly in America at the beginning of the series (the British isles having been lost to France long ago, before Britannia became a superpower, with the royal family relocating to to America), not in Europe/E.U.
  • Dear Shitamachi Princess lampshades this when Maria puts a magazine of her mother over her face and talks with what reads (as this is a manga) as a rough Brooklyn/gangster accent that only confuses her Japanese friends as 1. She's from a fictional Scandinavian country and 2. when said mother does make an appearance, there's no accent when she's presumably speaking her native language.
  • In the English dub of Demon City Shinjuku despite it taking place in Japan several characters have different accents, Sayaka speaks in a British accent, the cafe waitress has a Southern accent, Chibi aka Chippy in the dub has a Spanish accent, and Mephisto has a Romanian accent, the dub mainly used British actors and Sayaka’s was using her natural accent.
  • Despite everybody else speaking regular English without any noticeable accent, the English dub of Fantastic Children has Tohma (and to a lesser extent, his mother and father) speak in some strange unidentifiable accent.
  • Gintama: Kagura is an Anime Chinese Girl who often ends her sentences with "aru", a Verbal Tic used in Japanese Media as a stereotype to convey a Chinese accent. Despite her not actually being Chinese, it initially seems justified by the fact that the Yato have elements of a Fantasy Counterpart Culture of China. But then it turns out that neither her father, her brother, other Yato, or any other Amanto ever seen in the series for that matter, have trouble speaking perfect Japanese whithout any trace of an accent. Gintama being what it is, this is sometimes lampshaded or discussed for a joke.
  • The 4Kids Entertainment of Kirby: Right Back at Ya! infamously gave Meta Knight a Zorro-esque Spanish accent, and King Dedede a Southern accent. They live on an alien planet where those countries don't exist.
  • Hayate Yagami, introduced in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's comes from Uminari City like Nanoha. Hayate speaks in a Kansai dialect, but nobody else from the city does.
    • Even more mysteriously is Sieglinde Jeremiah from Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha ViVid. She also speaks in Kansai dialect, but she doesn't even come from Earth, she's from Mid-Childa. Although, it is said that Earth's culture has influenced Mid-Childan culture, but it is not known to which extent. Also, Sieglinde lives in the same city as Vivio and the rest, since she has to qualify in that city's tournament. Nobody from the city talks in Kansai dialect except Hayate.
    Harry Tribecca: "I wonder whether Sieg and Commander Yagami come from the same place."
  • Rau LeCreuset from Mobile Suit Gundam SEED speaks with a British accent (at least in the English dub), despite nobody else from ZAFT having one. He may be deliberately affecting one since he's living under an assumed name because he doesn't want anybody to know he's a clone. This is especially odd given that sourcebooks say he's ethnically French-Canadian.
  • The 4Kids Entertainment dub of One Piece gave Sanji a Brooklyn accent and Nico Robin a Southern accent. The former doesn't really have much of a reason why, but the latter could be because her outfit included a ten-gallon hat at the time of her introduction. Quite a bit of the supporting characters also had strange, unexplained accents.
  • In the Princess Minerva OVA the traveling saleswoman and tournament fighter Lachloa Valvis is given a Brooklyn accent in the English dub.
  • Sailor Moon:
    • Molly in the English dub has an utterly inexplicable and quite thick Bronx accent. The original character, Naru, has no accent at all relative to the rest of the characters.
    • At least one One-Shot Character actually got an accent out of nowhere — although neither of the characters from the Sailor V animation episode had an accent in the original, one of them was made to sound like a Southern belle in the DiC English dub.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh!: The 4Kids Entertainment dub specifically:
    • Joey Wheeler is a Japanese teenager with a thick Brooklyn accent.
    • Bakura was given a British accent to reflect his polite speech patterns in the original Japanese version, which unfortunately made a lot of fans mistakenly think he was British.
    • During the Virtual World arc, Kaiba duels his former right-hand man, Lector, who is in disguise, and instantly recognizes him because of his southern accent. Lector is Ambiguously Brown and is supposed to be from Japan like the other characters.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds: Yusei, Jack, and Crow all grew up together in the Satellite district and spent much of their lives there. In the 4Kids Entertainment dub, Jack and only Jack inexplicably has an Australian accent.
  • The English dub of YuYu Hakusho tends to give some characters accents that seem rather out of place:
    • Jin was given an Irish accent in the English dub in an attempt to mirror his Tohoku accent in the Japanese version. They even compounded on this by making Jin a Motor Mouth who speeds through sentences so it all comes out in a streak of barely-understood Irish phrases.
    • Chuu is given an Australian accent, which unlike Jin doesn't really reflect how he speaks in Japanese. This is probably a reference to Mad Max — he looks like he wandered in from either there or Fist of the North Star, after all.
    • Roto, the demon that tried to have Kurama's mother killed, had a Hungarian, Peter Lorre style accent in the dub; likely done to emphasize his menacing personality.

    Comic Books 
  • In Jane Foster: Valkyrie, Jane's horse, Mr Horse (he doesn't have a name, because he's not one o' your posh ponies from That Asgard) talks in a strong Yorkshire dialect. He's from Vanaheim, and nobody else from Vanaheim talks like that.

    Fan Works 
  • The Courier in Courier's Mind: Rise of New Vegas has a vaguely British-Chinese accent, despite living in the post nuclear war Mojave Desert.
  • Luna from Friendship is Witchcraft is the only character with her accent. Her accent is lampshaded in her introduction when somepony asks "Why does she have an accent?"
  • Lampshaded in Invisible Sun.
    "Did you learn all this in your home country?" she asked, charmed by his intelligence and strange mode of dress.
    "Um . . . yes?" He failed to see the point of the question and couldn't quite grasp what she was driving at. "I was born here in the United States, Ms. Keane."
    She blinked. "But . . . I thought you were Russian."
    "You did? Why?"
    "Your accent!"
    "I have one?" was his wide-eyed response. "Really?"
  • Sweary She-Ra's version of Hordak has a thick Geordie accent for some reason. His subordinates have a hard time understanding him.
  • In the Animaniacs fan-series entitled Zany To The Max:
    • Jot Warner, a cousin of Yakko, Wakko, and Dot, has a Mexican accent. Her accent was inspired by Speedy Gonzales, but that's not an In-Universe explanation.
    • Subverted with Jakko Zarner's Finnish accent. He can actually speak Finnish, explaining his accent. He was originally going to sound like a higher-pitched Wakko.
    • His sister, Zot, sounds like Dot with Wakko's accent.
    • Sikko has a Liverpudlian accent like Wakko's. Because of her "Animeniesque" appearance, you'd expect her to have a Japanese accent.

    Film — Animation 
  • English dubs of the animated adaptations of various Asterix comics almost never bother to give any characters French accents, but they at least try to be consistent about it so one can reasonably Hand Wave it as Translation Convention. The exception is Asterix In Britain, where they do bother to make Asterix and Obelix sound French to distinguish them from the English secondary characters, but the Romans all sound generically American — except for Caesar, who presumably got a British accent to make him sound posh — and the token black guy from that pirate crew who keep getting beaten up by our heroes has an accent that's probably meant to be Ebonics.
  • Among the Horny Vikings that make up the human cast of How to Train Your Dragon, all the teenager have SEV American accents while the adults have Scottish accents.
  • All of the bugs in James and the Giant Peach have different accents, despite being from the same (English) garden. The Grasshopper at one point states this explicitly, when the Centipede dishonestly brags that he's from Brooklyn (which would explain his accent).
  • In Lilo & Stitch, Dr. Jumba has a rather thick Russian accent and its characteristic lack of articles. In addition it being unusual due to him being a space alien, he is also at odds with the rest of the extraterrestrials in the movie, as they all have accents found in the Anglosphere. However, later movies have Dr. Hamsterviel, who has an equally unexplained French accent.
  • Scar and Zazu from The Lion King (1994) both have British accents when everyone else has American accents, despite being set in Africa. Scar's own family doesn't share his accent. He's got a cultured British accent, while nearly everyone else, including his brother, sounds American. It seems to be an Evil Brit thing — he's not British because he's British, he's British because he's evil.
  • Despite Pinocchio being set in Italy, a couple characters have different accents; the Coachman speaks with a Cockney accent, Pinocchio, Blue Fairy, and Jiminy Cricket have American accents, and Lampwick speaks in a Brooklyn accent. Geppetto was voiced by an Austrian actor, and the popularity of the Disney version means many other versions have the Italian toymaker sounding inexplicably German.
  • The Sheriff of Nottingham from Robin Hood (1973) has a Southern US accent, as do both his deputies. And Friar Tuck, Little John, and Alan-A-Dale all sound like they came straight out of a Western film, contrasting the English setting and accents by the rest of the characters. Maybe they were going for something like Cultural Translation, assigning characters accents that fit the nearest analogue to their archetype in US pop culture?
  • Nicodemus and Auntie Shrew from The Secret of NIMH have British accents, despite all the other characters having American accents.
  • Shrek:
    • Shrek the Scottish Ogre. According to Mike Myers he was originally Canadian.
    • Also, Robin Hood has a French accent.
    • Fiona has an American accent whilst her parents and Lord Farquaad have English accents.
    • Puss in Boots seems to be Spanish.
  • In Sleeping Beauty, Princess Aurora and Lord Duke both have British accents, despite the film being assumed to be set in Medieval France during the 14th Century. note  However, the rest of the characters have inaccurate American or Mid Atlantic accents including Mistress Flora, Mistress Fauna and Mistress Merryweather, Prince Phillip, King Stefan, King Hubert, Queen Leah, Maleficent, and the Goons.
  • In The Swan Princess, although it is implied to be set in Medieval England, several characters speak in different accents; Jean Bob has a French accent (meaning he came all the way from France, according to Odette’s Book of Wonderful Friends — Jean Bob), Derek, Odette, Alise, and Speed have American accents, and Sir Knuckles has a stereotypical Brooklyn accent while most of the characters have British accents, including Sir Rothbart, Lord Rogers, Lieutenant Puffin (Scottish or Irish accent), Bromley, Queen Uberta, Sir Clavius, Sir Chamberlain, and King William.
  • In The Sword in the Stone, despite being set in Medieval England, Arthur has an American accent while all the other characters have British accents, including Merlin, Madam Mim, Archimedes, Sir Ector, Sir Kay, Sir Pellinore, the Scullery Maid, and Sir Black Bart.
  • Tarzan learns to speak English from Jane, her father and Clayton — all of whom are British. Yet he speaks English with an American accent. Further muddying this issue is that early in the film before he knows English, he imitates Jane and Clayton's voices — English accents and all.

    Film — Live-Action 

Actors:

  • Over the course of his career Arnold Schwarzenegger has been zig-zagging this trope like crazy, since the guy's well known for his thick Austrian accent but usually plays American citizens. Some films like Commando will explicitly mention that Arnold's character is an immigrant from a German-speaking country, but others leave it unaddressed.
    • Arnold's most famous role in The Terminator never quite explained why the T-800 model had such a conspicuous way of speaking given he's meant to infiltrate and kill targets. James Cameron's idea was that the accent signified how the T-800 was attempting to copy human speech patterns, but not perfectly, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines makes a joke about the origin of the Terminator's accent.
    • Lampshaded in Last Action Hero the main character attempts to poke plotholes about Arnold's character in the Film Within a Film by pointing out his Austrian accent in spite of playing a native Californian. He simply replies "Eggsint? Vhat eggsint?"
    • In Predator, Dutch is an elite American special forces officer with a thick Austrian accent. It's not clear if his nickname is supposed to be a reference to his character's origin, whether Dutch or Deutsch.

Individual films:

  • King Leonidas of 300 has a strong Scottish accent. It's long been a convention amongst English translators of Ancient Greek plays to translate the Spartans as sounding Scottish (similar stereotypes), but only and specifically Leonidas sounds like this. The sequel gets even weirder, because its main character Themistocles sounds Australian. Everyone else is pure Queen's Ancient Greek.
  • Black Christmas (1974) has Olivia Hussey (British-Argentinian) playing a student in an American college. It's not once commented on why there's a British girl there, explaining whether she's an American citizen or just doing a semester there.
  • In Korean film Burning, Ben's Korean sounds completely different than the other characters', even though he apparently has the same background as them. This is because Steven Yeun is not a native Korean speaker (he left Korea with his family when he was five and grew up in the United States), but it also works in the movie, giving Ben—who comes off as a sociopath and is implied to be a Serial Killer—an alien, off-putting vibe.
  • Gaslight is set in Victorian London, and features American actor Joseph Cotton playing a Scotland Yard detective while keeping his accent. You could Hand Wave it by saying he's Canadian.
  • In The Girl on the Train, Emily Blunt doesn't hide her British accent, and it's never explained why she's the only British character in the film. The only reference to it at all is when she's talking to Dr. Abdic (played by Édgar Ramírez), and comments on his accent. He replies "Well, you have an accent." Blunt says it was a reference to the original novel, which was written by a British author and took place in London, and she also said it gave her character a stronger sense of isolation.
  • Goldfinger: Despite being played by the very Germanic Gert Frobe, when the character is introduced Felix Leiter says he's "British, but he doesn't sound like it." Of course Frobe was dubbed by another actor but he is still given a German accent. The character wasn't even British in Fleming's novel (he was Latvian) so why this was put into the film is a mystery (no other details about his background are mentioned). Possibly Leiter meant he is a naturalised British citizen (a detail that is mentioned in the novel), but it isn't clear.
  • In Highlander, Connor MacLeod was born a Scotsman, but Christopher Lambert has a Belgian French accent and practically had to recite his lines phonetically because he was so unfamiliar with English. He affects a bit of a Scottish accent as best he can in the flashback sequences, but his muddled accent actually makes a bit of sense in the modern day. When told that his accent is "funny" and asked where he's from, he replies, "Lots of places." Over the course of the centuries, it stands to reason that his accent is a mish-mash.
  • Bofur in The Hobbit trilogy has an Irish accent, unlike anyone else in the films other than the characters portrayed by his actor James Nesbitt's daughters.
  • The Hunt for Red October
    • Jack Ryan's wife speaks her few lines with an English accent. Both the character and the actress are American. (And when Gates McFadden was replaced with Anne Archer in later installments of the series, the English accent was dropped.)
    • Captain Raimus' Scottish accent, despite him being Lithuanian. At first one can dismiss it as Translation Convention as he's speaking with other soviets and the English is presumably for the convenience of the audience and they are actually speaking Russian, but later he interacts in English with still the thick Scottish accent Sean Connery is known for.
  • Dutch actor Rutger Hauer inexplicably adopts an American accent for his role in Ladyhawke and everyone else (except for actual American Matthew Broderick) sounds British, despite the setting being Medieval France.
  • Given a Hand Wave in The Lord of the Rings. Pippin speaks with a Scottish accent because Billy Boyd is Scottish — and they found his comic timing was better using his own voice than an English one. They justified it by saying his last name Took was supposed to be pronounced the same way a Scot would say it and so his home was Middle Earth's counterpart to Scotland.
  • The 2015 version of Macbeth (2015) has Lady Macbeth as a French woman, played by Marion Cotillard. There have however been a few French queen consorts in Scottish history, making this plausible.
  • Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior: It's anyone's guess why Lord Humongous, the post-apocalyptic warlord in the wastelands of Australia, has a thick Swedish accent.
  • Mary Reilly is set in Victorian London, and Dr Henry Jekyll is the only character speaking with an American accent; the other Americans in the cast speak in either English (Glenn Close) or Irish (Julia Roberts) accents. John Malkovich also portrays Edward Hyde with the same accent, which none of the characters comment on (although one notes the resemblance and assumes Hyde is an illegitimate son).
  • Monty Python's Life of Brian: While most of the cast speak in The Queen's Latin, the Judean People's Front inexplicably speak in a silly affected accent that is supposed to be German. Their leader was originally going to be a parody of Adolf Hitler, but all the scenes setting this up were cut, leaving only the German accent.
  • Almost every single character in Nemesis, where even the American actors playing Americans put on inexplicable foreign accents.
  • Areola in Not Another Teen Movie. Her accent is explained, in that she's a foreign exchange student. The inexplicable part is that it changes from scene to scene, often crossing oceans and continents.
  • Subverted in Pollyanna (1960). The original book had Pollyanna be American, but Hayley Mills (who is British) was simply ruled the best actress for the part. So even though she has an American aunt, she speaks with the actress's English accent. But subtle lines of dialogue say that her father was a minister in the British West Indies — implying her father was British (she's also seen teaching Nancy the English folk song "Early One Morning"). Hayley Mills also uses some American pronunciations in her voice, suggesting Pollyanna's speech was affected by growing up with an English and American parent.
  • The Recovered: Beverly Sloane speaks with actress Tina Krause's natural New York City accent, but everyone in her home town where she grew up speaks with a Wisconsin accent, including the actress who plays Beverly as a child in flashbacks. You might rationalize this by thinking that Beverly now lives in New York and changed her accent since leaving, but even her current boyfriend in New York has a Wisconsin accent.
  • Repo! The Genetic Opera: Pavi Largo speaks with some sort of Italian accent, despite having the same upbringing as his (American-accented) siblings. His father Rotti has a light Italian accent, in contrast to the thick, forced accent Pavi has. Rotti's accent is Paul Sorvino's natural speaking voice, while Pavi's was Nivek Ogre making fun of Sorvino. Supplementary materials claim that Pavi adopted his ridiculous accent to get over a severe childhood speech impediment, but as this is never alluded to in the movie itself, it still arguably counts as this trope.
  • The Rocky Horror Picture Show has a lot of this. Frank and Riff Raff both speak with very different British accents (Frank with a very plummy, drawling, London accent and Riff has a strained, nasal RP accent). Magenta speaks with a (possibly intentionally) terrible Transylvanian accent and Dr. Scott speaks with a German accent right from the get-go, when his nationality is supposed to be a secret.
  • The Room (2003). Johnny speaks with a very unusual accent that the movie never explains. In one scene he tells a story about when he first moved to San Francisco (where the movie is set), but he doesn't say where from, and his ambiguous wording ("it was an out-of-state bank") suggests he's still supposed to be from somewhere in the United States. This is apparently Tommy Wiseau's actual accent. He claims to be Cajun, but most people don't believe him and no one is able to place the accent for certain. Wiseau later confirmed he's from Poland but his accent — in English, at least — seems to be heavily influenced by his time living in France.
  • Sayonara: Marlon Brando chose to give his character a southern accent against the director's wishes, who thought a West Point educated general's son wouldn't speak that way.
  • It's not clear if it was intentional or not, but one scene in The Seven Year Itch has "The Girl" (played by California-born Marilyn Monroe) shift very briefly into what sounds like a stereotypical New York accent ("pahhty" instead of "party"), even though her character is said to be from Denver, Colorado. This can't even be explained as her trying to fit in with the native New York characters, since the actors playing them don't speak in New York accents.
  • In Sorry, Wrong Number, Ann Richards' character Sally Hunt-Lord is supposedly from a working class town in Illinois, but speaks with a 'Received Pronunciation' English accent. As Richards was born in Australia to an American father and a New Zealander mother, it's not her native accent either. It might be an affectation she adopted when she went to college—which would fit her character—but is never explained.
  • The Spiderwick Chronicles has a slightly confusing example where the elderly Lucinda speaks with an English accent (she's played by British actress Joan Plowright). Her child self is American however. While she could have lost her accent over the years, she's stated to have never left her house except to go to her retirement home — so how would she have picked up an English accent? Further muddying things is when she's restored to her child self at the end, and speaks with the American accent.
  • Street Fighter: Guile sports the American flag both on his uniform and, as it is in the games, tattooed on each bicep. This character detail was not revised in light of the minor detail that he's played by Jean-Claude Van Damme, who is making absolutely no effort to disguise his distinctive Belgian accent.
  • Thirst (1979): Although the film is set in Australia, all of Dr. Gauss' lines are delivered in actor Henry Silva's regular New York accent, something which is never explained or even commented on at any point in the film.
  • Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri features the minor character of Chief Willoughby's wife Anne, played by Australian actress Abbie Cornish for once not putting on a different accent. It's never explained how an Australian woman came to live in a small American town that's portrayed as very conservative.
  • Titanic (1997): Archibald Gracie IV is portrayed with an accent of the British Received Pronunciation variety. Although he was from a wealthy family in Alabama and had studied in the Northeastern USA, he doesn't sound American or even Transatlantic.
  • Transformers: Rise of the Beasts: Wheeljack speaks with a Mexican accent despite; A: Being in Peru, and B: Being a giant alien robot. He gets a bit short with Noah Diaz when the human assumes this means he can even speak Spanish at all.
  • We're All Going to the World's Fair: The main character, Casey, has an indefinable accent that occasionally sounds somewhat Scottish and other times more New York. She's a teenage girl living in a Northeastern American town, and the small fragment of speech we get from her father sounds American. It makes her seem even more alienated. The actress was born in Texas.
  • Werewolf (1996). Although Yuri (who is implicitly roughly Slavic in national origin) has an accent that causes comparisons to the Frito Bandito, Natalie's is... less easy to pin down. "It was a wurrwilf!"
  • The Wizard of Oz: In the scenes before Dorothy gets transported to Oz, the farmhands (played by the same actors as the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Lion) all speak with either Boston or New York accents despite supposedly being in Kansas.
  • In Zack Snyder's Justice League, Amber Heard's Mera speaks with a British accent, despite speaking with an American accent in the original theatrical cut and in Aquaman.

    Literature 
  • Stolas in The Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids speaks in a "crisp Scottish accent", despite being established as hailing from Ancient Greece.
  • Subverted in The Laundry Files: Boris (who works with the protagonist in a British intelligence agency) has a thick Russian accent for no apparent reason. Later on, it's explained that it's the result of magical brain damage.
  • Redwall tends to use species-specific Funetik Aksents, but occasionally gives one character an accent that doesn't fit. Most of the vermin speak either "generic thug" or Talk Like a Pirate, with the smarter ones and each book's Big Bad often speaking Standard English, but for some reason Dingeye and Thura in Salamandastron were recognisably Brummie, and Wraith speaks with Trrrilling Rrrs. Most of the hares come under the heading of Upper-Class Twit, but Rockjaw Grang had a very broad Oop North accent; justified in his case as he originally came from the Northlands, which are usually depicted as a Scotland analogue but likely have a nearby Yorkshire analogue.
  • Different species of Talking Animal in the Spellsinger novels also have different accents, and they're often Played for Laughs (e.g. Brooklynese tough-talk from a robin).
  • In three of the Warrior Cats audiobooks (Starlight, Twilight, and Sunset), the (American) actress gives medicine cats a British accent, possibly due to Smart People Speak the Queen's English, despite all the other characters and the narration being read with an American accent. Medicine cats are just normal cats — born and lived with their Clanmates all their lives — and just chose a different job, so where did the accent come from? Are they born with it and for some reason all cats with this accent take the medicine cat's job? Or does healing cats suddenly give you a different accent somehow?
  • Wuthering Heights gives Joseph a Funetik Aksent, which is odd since every other character is from Yorkshire too. And while it would make sense that the upper class characters would speak more refined, other servant characters such as Nelly don't speak the same way as Joseph. Most adaptations tend to drop this.
  • At least one collection of Ancient Spartan sayings and quotes (the place that gave us Laconic wit) give them (phonetic) Scottish accents.

    Live-Action TV 
  • In a commentary for a season 5 episode of 24, Julian Sands admits he didn't bother attempting an authentic accent for the Slavic Vladimir Bierko, imagining him to have spent a substantial amount of time in England. There's no in-universe indication that this is the case.
  • Connor in Angel has an American accent despite being raised from infancy by Holtz, an Englishman, in a demon dimension where they were the only two human beings. The only possible explanation is that the demons of Quor'toth have American accents.
  • Both Minbari ambassador Delenn and Centauri ambassador Londo of Babylon 5 have vaguely central/eastern European accents, which stand out all the more because their respective assistants don't, and it's a crapshoot as to whether any other individuals of their races will display an accent either. In Delenn's case it's Mira Furlan's actual Croatian accent. As for Londo Mollari, Peter Jurasik invented his accent, and William Forward imitated it as Lord Refa; there is a suggestion that Londo and Refa have similar accents because they are older and thus less used to speaking English than their underlings.
  • Whenever baby Wyatt on Charmed is turned evil by something (yes, this has happened more than once), his future adult self inexplicably becomes an Evil Brit despite being an American raised in San Francisco with two American parents, and speaking with an American accent when he's good. This can't even be blamed on the actor, because Wes Ramsey is American.
  • Chilling Adventures of Sabrina:
    • Sabrina's Aunt Hilda has a British accent, even though her sister Aunt Zelda has an American accent and it's heavily implied throughout the show that Hilda also grew up in Greendale. What's weirder is that Zelda is played by an Australian actress, so it's not as though they couldn't make them match.
    • Prudence also has an American accent, despite being raised by Father Blackwood — who has an English one — and her mother has been dead since she was a baby. Her actress seemed to pick up on this, as after her first couple of appearances, she adopts a mid-Atlantic sounding accent that suggests she picked up some of Blackwood's speech patterns while also those of the other American girls she was raised around.
  • Cinderella (1997) isn't really set anywhere in particular, and most of the cast speak with their natural American accents. Jason Alexander, however, who plays the royal majordomo Lionel, speaks with a nonspecific, vaguely-European accent of his own devising.
  • On Coupling, Londoner Jeff has a Welsh accent — his mother, when she's later introduced, doesn't. Notable for not being scripted that way, the actor just felt like doing one. Many in the cast didn't even know he wasn't Welsh until a few episodes in.
  • Danger 5 is about a Multinational Team of Allied spies during World War II, playing heavily on National Stereotypes. However, one of the agents, Pierre, isn't actually given a specific homeland, but just represents a mishmash of Southern European stereotypes and accents. Adding to the confusion is that the team are constantly running into people from Pierre's past in places from France to North Africa to Burma, all of whom seem to know him by different names. It's worth noting that Pierre's actor, Aldo Mignone, is Italian. When the role was recast, the gag was retired.
  • In the English dub of Dark (2017), Regina Tiedemann is dubbed with a German accent, while the rest of the cast are American. Including child Regina Tiedemann in the 1980s flashback scenes. Yes, she apparently grew into speaking English as a second language. In the original German, nobody speaks with any discernible dialect, to keep the location of the town of Winden ambiguous.
  • Doctor Who: In "Mawdryn Undead", Tegan and Nyssa are regressed to childhood by chronal energy. Child-Tegan has a British accent instead of an Australian one.
  • In-universe use: On The Drew Carey Show Kate wants to ditch her date, so she asks the guys to act like her crazy family so that her date would ditch her. Oswald comes in with a thick Ozarks accent claiming to be her brother and her baby's daddy. The date calls him on it: "If you're her brother why do you have an accent and she doesn't?" "Because... I was born on vacation!"
  • Game of Thrones:
    • Aidan Gillen is Irish and initially put on an English accent to play Littlefinger for the first couple of seasons. For some reason, he stopped doing this and just spoke in his natural accent. You could argue he kept the accent up as a way to fool people, but then again at this point in the story he'd have no reason to stop faking an accent if that were the case. Also, he's of Braavosi descent by way of the Riverlands, and neither place is shown to have Irish accents.
    • Tyrion (Peter Dinklage) also falls into this, being one of the few non-British actors in the main cast, and thus has an accent that sounds different to the other cast members.
    • Tormund (Kristofer Hivju) speaks with an odd accent that is noticeably different from the other wildling characters', yet is nothing like the actor's natural Norwegian accent.
    • Same goes for Sandor "The Hound" Clegane: Rory McCann has a thick Scottish accent in interviews, yet the Hound speaks with a different, vaguely Northern English accent that doesn't match that of either his brother "The Mountain" or any other character from the Westerlands.
  • Hill Street Blues: Andy Renko speaks with a distinct Southern twang, unlike everyone else in the cast, but "...was born in New Jersey, never been west of Chicago in my life."
  • In an episode of How I Met Your Mother, Lily is the subject of an "intervention" by her friends (who are pretty much addicted to doing interventions) for constantly affecting a Cockney accent over the course of several weeks.
  • Alexander Fitzhugh of Land of the Giants has an English surname, but speaks with an Austrian accent thanks to his Vienna-born actor, Kurt Kasznar. Since Fitzhugh is a Con Man, fans have speculated that he's using an assumed name. However, that is never confirmed in-universe.
  • Played for Laughs in The Librarians (2007). Neil has a British accent (which is actor Bob Franklin's natural accent). However, one episode reveals that he was born in Australia and grew up in the local area. This leads to one of the characters asking Neil's adoptive mother (who has an Australian accent) why he has a British accent. She says she doesn't know, but that he's always had it.note 
  • In Mako Mermaids: An H₂O Adventure, Mimi is portrayed to have an Anglo-North-American accent, possibly as a result of being portrayed by a Canadian actress. This gives the impression that such is the accent of the Northern Pod mermaids, and that Zac's Australian accent is due to having been raised by foster parents in Australia who were Australian. However, toward the end of the series when they are reunited with their mother, Nerissa, it turns out that she has an Australian accent like most of the cast, rather than the Anglo-North-American accent that we were previously led to see as being characteristic of the Northern Pod.
  • Maj. Winchester on M*A*S*H has a strong British accent, despite Bostonian origins. It's an (inaccurate) attempt at a Boston Brahmin accent, to go along with the character's upper-class background.
  • Detective Andy Sipowicz of NYPD Blue is a born and bred New Yorker...who bears the obvious Midwest accent that his actor, an Illinois native, comes with. It's never brought up in show.
  • Once Upon a Time:
    • A really confusing example with Geppetto. He has an Italian accent, presumably acknowledging that his literary source came from Italy. However in a flashback to his childhood, both he and his parents speak with American accents. His son Pinocchio also speaks with an American accent.
    • The show's take on Camelot is of a Fantasy Counterpart Culture of Medieval England. Yet Percival, Lancelot and Kay all have American accents. Guinevere sounding Spanish is also never explained, as she's shown to have grown up in the same village as Arthur.
    • Rumplestiltskin's father Malcolm is a really weird example; as an adult before his transformation into Peter Pan, Malcolm, like Rumple, has a Scottish accent. But Peter Pan has an English accent, and is implied to be created from Malcolm's actual childhood, if not completely identical to it...so did Neverland give him the English accent, or did he become Scottish and then English again?
    • Really, this is the baseline for all of the fantasy world characters, as the cast is a diverse make-up of American, British, Australian, and other actors, most of whom go with Not Even Bothering with the Accent. While some might be a nod to the origins of whatever story they're using, most aren't; Belle, for example, is played by an Australian actress and has an Australian accent, despite being from the same land as the American-accented Snow and Charming and the original fairy tale being French. No in-universe example is given for this, or even for why people from a fantasy world would even have accents that correspond to real-world countries.
  • Once Upon a Time in Wonderland: The Red Queen (and sometime Wicked Stepsister) Anastasia has an Oop North accent, which seems at odds with her mother's RP dialect.
  • Johnson in Peep Show, although ostensibly British, speaks with a funny kind of transatlantic accent that sometimes blends in a bit of West Indies (he's black). Though this is probably because he is a total phoney and a poser. Paterson Joseph is slightly inconsistent with the voice over the series but this might even be intentional (since it's most likely an affectation)
  • Red Dwarf
    • Cat, played by an English actor, speaks with an American accent, was born in space. The logic behind the Cat race having American accents is that they learned English by watching the film and TV programs stored on the ship — presumably, the majority of the media is American.
    • Chris Barrie uses a fairly ambiguous accent to play Ace Rimmer as opposed to the (more similar to Barrie's real accent) normal Rimmer accent. He speaks with a blend of English RP (which suits his status as stiff upper lip officer) and Trans-Atlantic, which is generally used to sound "cool", but has the side-effect of sounding slightly bogus, cheesy and affected. It's essentially perfect for the character of Ace.
  • Crystal on Roseanne speaks with a Southern accent despite having been born and raised in Lanford, Illinois.note  (Natalie West, who plays Crystal, is from North Dakota, making this a character choice.) This is lampshaded in the show itself when Roseanne and Jackie ask Crystal why she speaks with a Southern accent and (obviously having heard this explanation before) they chorus her response: "My father's from Arkansas!"
  • Scream Queens (2015) has Earl Grey — who is a Manchester boy — in the fraternity the Dickie Dollar Scholars. It's never explained how a British guy ended up at an American college or why he joined the fraternity.
  • In Seriously Weird, Steve, who is supposedly a Greek god, has a Scottish accent. But, then again, he is the god of chaos.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation.
    • Deanna Troi's accent, given that Marina Sirtis invented the accent as reflecting her Betazoid upbringing, but other actors playing Betazoids don't bother trying to imitate it, leaving it rather inexplicable. A couple of episodes do attempt to address it; in one, it's stated that she picked it up from her human father (who later appears in "Dark Page", and does not have the accent), and in another, it's blamed on her nanny.
    • The French Jean-Luc Picard has an undisguised British accent. Reportedly, Patrick Stewart made a game effort at a French accent in early screen tests, but never got it to sound convincing or consistent enough, and gave it up as a bad job. Things get even more inexplicable when we meet Picard's brother Robert, who (despite being a Frenchman who's lived all of his life in France), also has a British accent... except that it's a different regional accent than Picard's, even though it's explicitly stated the two grew up in the same area where Robert still lives. Star Trek: Picard eventually makes an attempt at a partial explanation by mentioning that the Picard family fled their vineyard in France because of World War II and moved to England for several generations before returning.
  • In the Supernatural episode "All Hell Breaks Loose, Part One" (S02, Ep21), when Dean asks Sam to bring him some pie, he slips into a Southern accent as he says "pi-ah". In this case, it's because the actor playing Dean is from Texas, and has explained that his accent tends to slip as filming drags on. Dean and Sam are from Kansas, which is also in the South but tends to be less heavily accented.
  • In Timeless, Goran Višnjić speaks with his distinctive Croatian accent, despite Flynn Garcia presumably being an American of Hispanic and Irish ancestry- in fact, in one episode, giving his name establishes his bona fides when speaking with the Spanish/Mexican General Santa Anna. This is sometimes given a Lampshade Hanging in the show itself, including one episode where a Union general is suspicious of him and cites his unplaceable accent, and another where when claiming the two are Pinkertons, Rufus identifies Flynn as "Hans Gruber", to Flynn's annoyance.
  • Often invoked in Whose Line Is It Anyway? when someone attempts a particular accent badly and another player will mock it by implying this trope is going on, e.g. "If we're all from France than how come you speak like a Russian?" Once during a Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?-esque game, Ryan spontaneously switches to a southern accent for no good reason before trying to pass it off as using the accent so that the person he's talking to doesn't know where he's really from.

    Music 

    Radio 

    Theatre 
  • Tituba in The Crucible speaks with broken English and is usually given an African-sounding accent. Her real life counterpart was in the English colony since she was a child, so her English should be as good as anyone else's.

    Video Games 
  • AkaSeka: Michinaga speaks in Kansai dialect even though the setting does not have a Kansai region. Ditto Sakamoto and his Tosa accent, while in this case it's slightly more justifiable considering the historical figure he's based on.
  • In the English version of the Asterix and Obelix: XXL games, Asterix speaks with a French accent. This makes some sort of sense as he is from what eventually became France, but it fails to qualify as Just a Stupid Accent as none of the other Gauls have one. The other Gauls speak in various British Accents — Vitalstatistix is Scouse, Obelix is a bit Cockney, and so on. Getafix and Julius Caesar both speak RP despite one being a Roman and the other being a Gaul. All of the Gauls mentioned so far were born and raised in the same village of about 200 people. While making no sense, it serves as nice shorthand for their character archetypes — Asterix is a revolutionary and a French patriotic hero, Obelix is rowdy, blunt and quirky, Getafix is learned, Caesar is Shakespearean and very classy, and Vitalstatistix is tough but a bit shiftless, all of which are stereotypes a British person would ascribe to their accents.
  • Bloodborne mostly has accents from the British Isles (mostly English, with some Irish), but the Plain Doll has a Slavic accent that almost nobody else in Yharnam has. It's eventually revealed that she got it from the human she was designed after, Lady Maria...whose accent is also unexplained, because she's from Cainhurst, whose few survivors appear to be just as English as Yharnamites (the two places aren't even particularly far apart).
  • In Borderlands 3, Zane Flynt speaks with an Irish accent despite the fact that his brothers Baron and Captain Flynt in the previous games have American accents.
  • Chrono Cross. Every. Single. Character. Has some random accent. Australian, French, Russian, German, anything you can think of. And it doesn't make sense, considering that it's not like you travel to different countries. And quite a few characters that have completely different accents live in the same town. Hum. At least Kid's is probably affected. After all, Schala didn't talk like that in Chrono Trigger.
  • Frog speaks Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe in the SNES version of Chrono Trigger. Not only does no one else speak like that, flashbacks even show his own human self speaking in normal modern English! The DS version of the game, having a new translation, fixes this: Frog speaks somewhat old-timey, but so does everyone else in his era.
  • Death Stranding: Multiple characters have different accents, even though the game takes place in a post-apocalyptic United States where air travel is literally physically impossible and it's very unlikely that sea travel for long distances happens either. Deadman's Mexican accent is relatively understandable, but Fragile's French, Heartman's British and the Chiral Artist's Japanes are decidedly less so. In case of the Chiral Artist it's revealed that her parents were immigrants from Japan that arrived in America shortly before the Stranding started and she was later adopted by an American woman after her parents died, so this might explain her case. The common theory in the fandom is that Fragile and Heartman also had immigrant parents and grew up in secluded shelters, only being able to learn English from said parents, whose English was already accented.
  • Dota 2 has a lot of accents in a world where the places they originate from don't exist. For example, Pudge (a corpulent humanoid that devours human flesh), Bristleback (an ill-tempered porcupine-man who constantly gets into barfights), and Slark (a diminutive fish-man with a penchant for stabbing) all have Cockney accents.
  • Bodhan and Sandal, recurring characters of the Dragon Age series, speak with heavy Cockney accents rather than the American accents that dwarves generally have in the setting. This is despite the fact that Bodhan himself is from the dwarven city of Orzammar. This may be a failed attempt to fake the local human accents; Bodhan especially is using an exaggerated Fereldan accent.
  • In The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Brynjolf and Delvin of the Thieves' Guild speak with a Scottish and a Cockney accent respectively and are the only ones to do so. Brynjolf is particularly unusual since other Nords speak with a Scandinavian accent or none at all. Delvin can be at least somewhat justified by the fact that he's a Breton, and their home province of High Rock is the most straightforward example of a Britain expy the setting has (with a little French thrown in for good measure). What makes him stand out is that he is literally the only NPC in the game with that accent, making it seem very unusual. However, according to his backstory in the official guide, Delvin grew up as an orphan in Riften and his his brother in Solstheim doesn't have the accent. There are possible explanations for Brynjolf, but it still makes it odd that he's the only one to use it — he's either speaking in an archaic dialect (back in the Morrowind days, the Nords sounded Scottish), or a Morrowind-settlement dialect (the Nords in Morrowind sounded Scottish).
  • In Fallout 2, Sulik has a Caribbean accent, despite being from post-apocalyptic Northern California/Southern Oregon. Every other voiced character has an accent that's appropriate for the region.
  • Fallout 3:
    • Moriarty and Tenpenny, who have Irish and British accents respectively while everyone else in the game speaks with an American accent. This makes no sense in a post-apocalypse world where the ability to cross the Atlantic ocean was lost centuries ago, assuming that the British Isles are even still inhabited. Word of God is that Tenpenny at least was supposed to hint at a post-War UK. Desmond Lockhart in Point Lookout is also referred to as a "limey". Moriarty, on the other hand doesn't have a real Irish accent, instead using the stereotypical Oirish accent and is implied to be faking it.
    • Similarly, there's Dukov, who speaks with a thick Russian accent.
    • Even among the American accents, Moira Brown has a Midwestern accent that sticks out in the Maryland/DC area.
    • Colonel Autumn speaks with a thick Southern accent despite the fact that he was born and raised in an oil rig off the coast of California.
  • Fallout 4:
    • Cait (voiced by Scottish-born Katy Townsend) speaks with a thick Irish accent while the Bobrov brothers in Diamond City have thick Russian accents. Proctor Quinlan of the Brotherhood of Steel has a stuffy British accent while Dr. Carrington and Dr. Amari have Indian accents.
    • This continues into the DLC: the elder Nakanos both have Japanese accents, while Nuka-World adds in Overboss Colter, a Cockney-accented Raider.
  • Fallout: New Vegas: Melissa Lewis, daughter of Chomps Lewis of Sloan, has an unexplained New Zealander accent which nobody else has, including her father. This isn't even a case of her voice actress Not Even Bothering with the Accent as Zoë Bell plays "Female Adult 06" and three other named characters, all of whom speak with American accents. Melissa is the only one to use Bell's native New Zealand accent.
  • Far Cry Primal gives us Urki. Who has a thick, hillbilly accent despite being a Neolithic caveman residing in what will become Europe.
  • Final Fantasy:
    • Cyan of Final Fantasy VI speaks in Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe in the SNES translation, and a less "butcherede" version thereof in the GBA translation. No one else in his home country, family, or the rest of the game speaks like that.
    • Compilation of Final Fantasy VII:
      • In the original game, Cloud would occasionally use folksy Southern-US dialect words when startled or not paying attention, which is a believable detail for a country boy with self-image issues. What doesn't make sense is how Tifa, who comes from the same place as him, never shows any trace of an accent at all. The Compilation averts this with Steve Burton's voicing of Cloud.
      • Cait Sith was written in text in the original game as having an accent (Kansai dialect in the original Japanese), with the conceit that it was the alter ego of his animator/alter ego Reeve, who usually disguised it. One scene focuses on him getting rumbled by the Shinra due to suddenly talking in Cait Sith's accent, although where he came from originally to pick the accent up was never explained. The original game Woolseyfied it into a Southern accent, but in Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children and Dirge of Cerberus he has a Scottish accent — a literal Mythology Gag considering that "Cait Sith" is a Scottish fairy.
      • The Compilation seems to be good about those. In Dirge of Cerberus, Rosso the Crimson has a random Russian accent (despite the fact she was born and raised underground). Nero the Sable has a British accent, despite being born with the same circumstances as Rosso.
      • Cid gets a Texan accent, which was also hinted at in the game. Though just going by the text, an East London accent is equally applicable.
    • Over in Final Fantasy X, Wakka's thick pseudo-Jamaican accent would make sense as a Besaid accent…if anyone else from said island had the same accent. Which they don't. The closest they get is random villagers without recorded voices copying Wakka's Verbal Tic.
    • Subverted in Final Fantasy XIII. Vanille and Fang's Australian accent may seem out of place until it's revealed they come from Pulse, which is "down under" Cocoon"
    • Ignis from Final Fantasy XV speaks in a stately, received-pronunciation English accent, despite everyone else in the Kingdom of Lucis sounding American. An egregious example, considering that RP-English is the default accent of the much-despised Niflheim Empire, who Lucis have been at war with for decades.
  • Alice Gray, Anna's young daughter in later installments of the Grim Tales series of hidden object games, has a strange British accent reminiscent of Peppa Pig. Neither Anna nor her husband Dorian speak with such an accent — nor does the teenage Alice, in her debut appearance in Guest From the Future — so it's unclear why the child version of the character does.
  • Most of the cast of Hades have British accents in a game set in Ancient Greece. Skelly, however, has a voice like a slick used car salesman.
  • Heavy Rain: Although taking place in America, several characters have French accents that are never explained. Lauren might be a French immigrant, but the Mars and Sheppard kids are American-born to American parents and have no excuse. Unsurprisingly, the game was made by a French developer.
  • Parodied in Jay's Journey, where one NPC gives hints to a minigame in hard-to-decipher cockney, and Jay wonders where she could have picked the accent up.
  • In The Journeyman Project the PA voice at the Temporal Security Annex inexplicably has an Afro-British accent, and Dr. Elliott Sinclair has an American accent despite hailing from Sydney, Australiaor rather, from Atlantis, but that only makes his accent stranger. The accent of the Morimoto Mars Colony PA is at least justified by it being a Japanese corporation.
  • KanColle: Ryuujou speaks with a Kansai dialect despite her being "born" in Yokohama.
  • League of Legends:
    • Fiora is, so far, the only champion in the entire world of Runeterra with a French accent. Legends of Runeterra gives it a little more explanation by introducing a "Laurent Duelist" follower who similarly shares it... then it got wackier with the "Burgeoning Sentinel" explicitly from Demacia and implicitly tied to the Laurent house, who has an Irish accent.
    • Viktor is the only person with a Vaguely German/Russian/Eastern European one.
    • Caitlyn's high-class English accent is utterly unlike those of other Piltover natives, who speak with various American accents. They eventually resolved this one with Camille, however, who is also apparently English, cementing it as the accent for Piltover's upper class.
    • Tahm Kench has a very noticeable Cajun accent, and is the only character in the entire game to feature such an accent. Even his being a demon doesn't explain it, as none of the other demon champions feature one.
    • Braum has a very distinct Russian accent as per his Husky Russkie archetype, but isn't prevalent in any other Freljordian characters.
    • Aatrox's post-update voiceover also gives him an incredibly thick and booming Russian accent, despite having no relation to the Freljord. It can't even be attributed to him being a Darkin, as neither of the other two Darkin champions have it at all.
    • Pantheon has a Greek accent, which makes sense given his entire character is heavily influenced by Spartans, but also doesn't make sense as nobody else in the game has it, including others from the same region in Mount Targon.
    • Lillia is a fae-like deer spirit who speaks with a Scottish accent. Pretty standard as far as this game goes, but it gets even sillier considering that Lillia hails from Ionia, a region inspired by east Asia.
    • Gwen has a transatlantic accent (a mix of American and British English), which is also normal on its own, but is weird primarily due to her originating from Camavor, a long-forgotten kingdom inspired by conquistador-era Spain (Viego, its last ruling king, speaks with a European Spanish accent). Gwen might not have inherited the accent due to her originally being a doll that was recently given human form by soul magic, but that just raises additional questions.
  • Most Legend of Zelda games take place in the fictional country of Hyrule, which is based heavily on Europe (especially Greece). The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is the first Zelda title to feature a large amount of voice acting (previous games featured single words, often in Japanese, or in the case of Wind Waker the segment was just left out of translated versions). The accents seem to be a mixed bag. Many characters seem to speak with American accents despite the European Medieval Stasis aesthetic. Princess Zelda, on the other hand, does have a British accent. Two stranger examples would be Zelda's father King Rhoam and the Great Deku Tree, who both speak with what can be considered 75% American, 25% British accents.
  • Pip in Luminous Arc 2 has a sort of British accent for some unknown reason. No one else in the game does, including his twin sister Pop. Moose has a German accent, but he supposedly studied at a foreign university, so that may explain the accent.
  • Kaguya in the English version of Mary Skelter: Nightmares has a vaguely British accent while every other character, playable and NPC alike, has an American accent. What makes it interesting is that the game takes place in Japan, albeit underground for about 20 years, and her real-life inspiration ("The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter") is the only Japanese fairy tale represented in the game. If anything, it would make more sense for her fellow Fairy Tale-inspired Blood Maidens to have different accents from everyone else.
  • Javik of Mass Effect 3 has a Nigerian accent, although the other Protheans we see in flashbacks have American accents. Possibly justified as the others are being translated but he's actually speaking English. Noticeably, the Prothean VI you meet in the latter half of the game speaks with the same accent as Javik.
  • Metal Gear Solid: The series has quite a few instances of this.
    • Raiden was born and raised in the African country of Liberia, but has an American accent. Though in all fairness, he looks nothing like a Liberian either.
    • Colonel Volgin from Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater has an American accent despite being Russian. The same applies to the enemies and scientists.
    • Hot Coldman from Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker is listed as an American, yet has an accent. It doesn't even sound like something from any discernable region, just some hammy 1930s cartoon kind of accent.
  • Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden is set in post-apocalyptic Sweden, and everyone is voiced with American accents ... except for Farrow, who speaks like a working-class Londoner. From what we learn about her, she is from the same region as everyone else.
  • Namu Amida Butsu! -UTENA-: Kokūzō speaks in Tosa accent and Nikkō in Kansai dialect without clear reasons why; in the case of the latter, it's more likely for characterization reasons as a comedy enthusiast, especially in manzai, rather than regional.
  • Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon: Mr. Nuzleaf's dialogue is written in a Southern American dialect, while Hippopotas' dialogue is written in a German accent. There's no in-universe explanation given for this, especially since no other character is written with any kind of accent.
    • Two NPCs on the roof of Mauville City in Pokémon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire have Scottish accents despite Mauville being based on Kumamoto in Japan. The most likely explanation is that this is an Accent Adaptation, because when Pokémon introduced an area actually based on Scotland, the Crown Tundra in the Galar region, not one character there had a Scottish accent.
  • In Portal 2, Wheatley has a West Country accent and Rick the Adventure Sphere has an Australian accent, despite them both being Artificial Intelligences made by the American company Aperture Science.
  • The Merchant in Resident Evil 4 has a Piratish/Cornish accent for some reason. The entire game takes place in an unspecified and unnamed rural region of Spain.
  • Claudia in Silent Hill 3 is an American character voiced by an Australian voice actress, Donna Burke. For whatever reason, she has a British accent, even in the HD redub, where she is voiced by Laura Bailey.
  • In Sonic Adventure 2, there's a scene where Eggman sees a news broadcast of Shadow stealing a Chaos Emerald and being mistaken for Sonic. The newscaster, for whatever reason, has a thick English accent, despite the fact that the city the game is set in is a pretty blatant Expy of San Francisco. Further, the actress clearly isn't actually English, and putting on the accent is making her delivery extremely awkward. Why the actress simply couldn't use her natural voice remains a mystery.
  • In the talkie version of Space Quest IV, the Big And Tall sales clerk inexplicably has a French accent.
  • Star Wars: The Old Republic:
    • Every Republic character has an American accent and every Imperial character save for Mandalorians has a British accent. What makes this odd is that the British accent in-universe is very explicitly Coruscanti, i.e. the accent of the Republic's capital world. It is the only work in the entire Star Wars universe to do this and no explanation is given for the switch. While it's likely to make the Sith Empire seem like the Empire of the Original Trilogy, this still doesn't make sense because Palpatine's Empire was based on Coruscant and was the Republic before he took over. The Sith Empire has a totally different geographic origin.
    • Imperial Agent companion Ensign Temple seems to be the only Imperial with an Australian accent.
  • In the Japanese version of Street Fighter Hakan speaks in an Osakan accent despite being from Turkey.
  • Super Mario Bros.:
    • Mario and Luigi have strong pseudo-Italian accents, despite (maybe) growing up in the Mushroom Kingdom, though, there's nothing that says there isn't an Italy-equivalent there. Originally, the Mario Bros. were both going to speak with gruff Brooklyn accents, but they were immediately changed into Italian accents after Shigeru Miyamoto found them too terrifying to children.
    • At the end of the final level of Super Mario Galaxy, when Bowser Jr. shows Mario/Luigi the captive Peach being tied to the mast of his spaceship just right before the final boss battle against Bowser, Peach, for some reason, has a Japanese accent. She has it again at the end of Super Mario 3D Land, this time after Mario sees Bowser tie her to a flagpole.
  • Ness in Super Smash Bros. uses a Japanese voice actress with a noticeable accent in every game. In EarthBound Ness is from an America stand-in. Lucas, however, averts this, which is ironic since Ness's game was released internationally while Lucas's remains an infamous case of No Export for You.
  • Played with in Tales of Monkey Island, where the Marquis De Singe is offended at the implication that he's French. Even though he's got the accent... and the outfit ...and the name... And he always looks when you point out King Louis XVI (Or XV, or XIV, or XIII...)
  • In Tales of Symphonia, exactly three characters have accents distinct from the rest of the cast, all very vaguely British. In the case of Botta and Origin, it's probably the actor — Robin Atkin Downes was born in the United Kingdom. Kvar doesn't have that excuse, and appears to be a case of invoked Evil Brit.
  • Though it's hard to tell as he's not actually voiced except with Voice Grunting, Sans from Undertale speaks in a Funetik Aksent which many fans peg down as New Yorkian. Odd given he's a skeleton who has at least supposedly spent all his life underground among monsters who don't have readable accents at all; not even his own brother has one.
  • In the English PS2 version of Ys VI: The Ark of Napishtim, Olha, voiced by Torontan actress Kathleen Barr, has a quasi-Irish accent; while her uncle Chief Ord, voiced by Brian Dobson, a native Londoner, has a James Earl Jones-esque Mid-Atlantic accent; most of the other Rehda and the genetal cast have generic American accents (even Big Bad Ernst, who one would expect to be an Evil Brit, also being voiced by Brian Dobson); Eresian castaway Xaxon (Terry Klassen from Winnipeg, Manitoba) talks like he's from the Deep South; and Admiral Agares(Trevor Devall) has a thick Germanic accent(e.g. pronouncing "w" as "v" and uvular Trilling Rs) despite being from the game world's equivalent of Spain.

    Web Animation 
  • Burger Brawl: Tippers's Spanish accent contrasts with her son Logi's as well as the rest of the cast's American accents. Later episodes introduced Tippers' dads who turn out to not have the same accent as their daughter, making hers all the more unexplained.
  • A Day With Bowser Jr: Fawful has a completely random and unexplained Jamaican accent.
  • Strong Bad from Homestar Runner has a Hispanic accent, though it's been toned down over the years. While it fits with the luchador mask that constitutes as his face, neither of his brothers speak with the same accent and there's no In-Universe explanation for why he has it.
  • If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device has Magnus's Australian accent, Leman Russ's Scottish accent (both of these were done due to their VAs inability to do the right accent), Vulkan's Jamaican and Ork Cockney accent, and Little Kitten's British accent. Vulkan is worse (and funnier) because he never had it until a certain point.
  • Murder Drones: J, N, and V all speak American English, despite later episodes revealing that prior to becoming assembly drones, they were owned by and had most of their interactions with a wealthy Australian family. Could be justified by them being robots who were manufactured by JC Jenson, a parody of the real-life American company SC Johnson.
  • The Oats Series: Older Pig is the only character with an American accent in a series where almost everyone speaks with British Accents.
  • Object Terror: Trowel, Paint and Road Sign have Romanian, Egyptian and Filipino accents respectively whereas everyone else has American accents. It becomes a double example with Road Sign inexplicably switching to British.
  • Princess Natasha: Natasha has an American accent and talks like an American teenager, despite being from a European country. Her dad has a British-sounding accent, and Oleg and Lubek have vaguely Russian accents.
  • Object Shows have a high tendency of switching out voice actors between episodes, leading to characters suddenly gaining accents they never had or losing them entirely. This is usually due to people using their natural accents which vary across the OSC's worldwide fanbase and the limited availability of such voice actors resulting in object shows using whoever's free at the moment regardless of whether they sound remotely similar to the previous one or not.
    • A noteworthy example would be Jacob Fairclough, a rather-famous OSC voice actor who starred in multiple object shows, as no matter what character he voiced, it would always be British and be out of place in a usually predominant American cast.

    Web Video 
  • In-Universe in A Heist with Markiplier. Yancy speaks with a strong Bronx accent but mentions that he's from Ohio and his father was always judging him for his accent.
  • Pokémon Talk: In-universe example with Bulbasaur questioning why Squirtle had a British accent, in the first episode, and subsequently for the rest of the series, due to never talking like that before.

    Western Animation 
  • Adventure Time:
    • Everyone has a standard "newscaster" American accent (and usually not a "cartoony" take on one, either) except Tree Trunks (Southern) and Flambo (New Yorker). No in-universe explanation is given for either.
    • Goliad also has an English accent, despite being both raised by and based off of the DNA of one of the aforementioned newscaster-voiced characters.
    • Minerva Campbell is voiced by Sharon Horgan, and keeps her Irish accent. Nobody else in the series has one.
  • On American Dad!, CIA Director Bullock has a British accent, which isn't addressed. It's rare for a high-ranking official in the federal government to be a U.S. immigrant, but it's not unheard of. The last immigrant Director of Central Intelligence was only in 1996: the Belgian-born John Deutch.
  • Animaniacs:
    • Wakko has a Liverpudlian accent even though his brother and sister both have American accents. His voice is actually Jess Harnell's impression of Ringo Starr.
    • Pinky of Pinky and the Brain speaks with a cockney accent, which is why one of his lesser-used Verbal Tics is "zounds", even though he's a genetically-altered mouse from a lab in California. In one episode, Brain finds and modifies Pinky's parents, who also speak with cockney accents. Lampshaded by "Dr. Brainenstein" in an episode of Animaniacs (2020).
    Dr. Brainenstein: Have you seen my laboratory assistant, Pigor? Skinny, white, buck teeth, inexplicable cockney accent?
  • Aqua Teen Hunger Force:
    • Meatwad speaks with a small but noticeable Southern accent, despite the series taking place in the state of New Jersey.
    • Oglethorpe is a space alien, yet speaks with a distinct German accent.
  • Veronica from Archie Comics is portrayed with a Southern accent in a lot of older media, such as the radio show and especially The Archie Show affiliated cartoons. Veronica is from the North-East.
  • Iroh from Avatar: The Last Airbender has a Japanese accent, despite the rest of his family having American accents.
  • Good luck trying to nail down George Harrison's accent in the 60's cartoon The Beatles. It definitely isn't Liverpudlian. Whatever it is, it's sure as heck not British. One cartoon even said he was Transylvanian!
  • Marty and Betty Storkowitz from Birdz both have British accents, which is odd given their kids have American accents.
  • The Brak Show: Dad speaks with a Cuban accent for some unexplained reason. Mom initially didn't have an accent, but spoke with one of British descent starting in the second season.
  • Gordon on Catscratch has a Scottish accent, despite both of his brothers having "ordinary" American accents.
  • Snap from ChalkZone has a notable Bronx accent, but no one else in ChalkZone does. Presumably, that's just how Rudy heard his voice in his head when he drew the character.
  • Cow and Chicken: Chicken has a thick Brooklyn accent, but his parents and sister don't.
  • Danger Mouse:
    • The alien episode "Multiplication Fable" has a thick Welsh accent. As he meets our heroes in the Birmingham region:
    Penfold: Um, DM...that's not how they talk in Birmingham, do they?
    DM: Good heavens, no, Penfold. He's from another planet.
    • Quark, the alien trying to claim Earth through a cosmic charter, has a Scottish accent that the narrator calls "a strange alien tongue."
  • Dexter of Dexter's Laboratory has a thick stereotypically Eastern European accent because of the connotations of Russians and German scientists, even though none of his family members do. And Dexter's mother is the only member of the family with a Minnesota accent.
  • DuckTales (2017):
    • Webby speaks with a regular American accent, despite the fact that she was raised by her British granny in a Scottish trillionaire's mansion and, by her own admission, "didn't hear an American accent until [she] was, like, seven."
    • Lena likewise lacks any trace of her aunt's British accent, despite being Magica's shadow brought to life, rather than an actual relative, meaning she didn't even learn to speak; she simply popped into existence with the wrong accent.
  • The titular characters in Erky Perky have Scottish accents, despite the series presumably taking place in Canada or Australia (as it's a co-production between the two countries).
  • Family Guy:
    • Stewie has a British accent despite his parents both being American. Parodied in Viewer Mail #2 with the British version of the Griffins. British Stewie has a Southern accent.
    • In "He's Too Sexy for His Fat," a Cutaway Gag shows that Brian's Chinese acupuncturist has an inexplicably thick Irish accent. Even the cast and crew in the official commentary don't have an explanation and want to know what his story is.
    • For some reason, Lois has a strong Joisey accent, but her father and sister do not.
  • Fantaghirò: It’s fairly common for comedic characters, especially nonhuman ones, to have accents that they have no business having. The worst offender in this regard is probably the talking arrow from “The Weapons Of Peace”, which sounds like it’s from New York.
  • In the second season of Fantastic Four: The Animated Series (as well as a guest spot in The Incredible Hulk (1996)), Simon Templeman voiced Doctor Doom with an English accent, despite the character hailing from the fictional Central European nation of Laveria. Iron Man: Armored Adventures, Spider-Man: The Animated Series and the first season of the aforementioned Fantastic Four are the only cartoons where Doom actually sounds Germanic; most other shows tend to give him a generic American accent.
  • Fillmore!: The brave Safety Patrol of X Middle School have solved many mysteries, but somehow never got around to investigating the inexplicably substantial number of students sporting vaguely British accents. The accent of Ambiguously Brown librarian Mr. Lender at least makes a kind of sense, assuming he was raised in England before moving to America, but the number of pseudo-English students is remarkably high for an American (Minnesotan, according to Word of God) school.
  • The British cartoon The Foxbusters is about three hen sisters — Ransome (Whoopi Goldberg), Sims (Joanna Lumley) and Jeffries (Jane Horrocks). They all have different accents. Ransome's American accent is lampshaded at least once.
  • Amy on Futurama has a Valley Girl accent, despite being from Mars and living in New New York. Her parents have heavy Chinese accents, despite being multi-generational Martians, though this is theoretically justified since they're at least ethnically Chinese. Amy also speaks Chinese on occasion, making it even more ambiguous what the status of Chinese is in that family/Martian life.
  • Li'l Gideon from Gravity Falls speaks and acts like a stereotypical Southerner, despite being born in Oregon.
  • In The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy, The Grim Reaper has a Jamaican accent of all things. It vaguely has to do with Hollywood Voodoo as his auntie (voiced by Dawnn Lewis) also has dreads and cooks around a cauldron, but goes right back into unexplained territory with his dad speaking with a general American accent (voiced by Kurtwood Smith) and being more or less a cowboy. Grim's mother is a stereotypical Jewish mother, with an appropriate accent. Even stranger, even though neither of Grim's parents have the Jamaican accent, his grandmother does. It's likely a reference to Geoffrey Holder's character Baron Samedi in the James Bond movie Live and Let Die, who wore skull-faced make-up and had the same accent. Incidentally, Grim's voice actor, Greg Eagles, intended the character to have a Swedish accent (in reference to The Seventh Seal), but it ended up coming out as Jamaican.
  • Some of the Heroes of Hero Factory, who are robots constructed on an alien robot planet, have these, most notably Stringer speaks with a southern accent. Surge is a stranger case, as with the change of his voice actor he suddenly and inexplicably adopted a strong Australian accent.
  • Several characters on Hey Arnold! have New York and Eastern U.S. accents, despite Word of God stating the show takes place in Washington.
  • In Home Movies, Ken Addleburg and his son Junior both speak with a ridiculously comical, and completely unexplained accent. Ken's voice actor, Brendon Small, re-used the accent for Victor (who is an immigrant from Cuba) on the Comedy Bang! Bang! podcast.
  • On Invader Zim, Tak has a British accent while none of the other Irkens do. Lard Nar has one as well, though we only have one other Vort to compare him with.
  • Jimmy Two-Shoes: Despite the fact 90% of the cast is monsters and the show takes place in a cartoon analogue of Hell, Molotov and his unnamed wife have a Russian accent (a reference to their Husky Russkie appearances and Vyacheslav Molotov), while Rudolpho and his son Peep have Cockney accents (based on their occupation as swindlers and the stereotype of Cockneys as criminals).
  • Olaf from Kaeloo has a Russian accent despite being from Planet Smileyland's equivalent of Antarctica.
  • The Lion Guard:
    • Jasiri and Madoa have Australian accents. There is another hyena unrelated to them that has the same accent, but none of the other hyenas in the series have it. Odd.
    • Apparently, all African vultures have British accents, or at least Liverpudlian ones..
    • King Sokwe and his sons all speak with British accents. However, fellow gorilla Shujaa engages in Hulk Speak, with an American accent.
    • "Ono and the Egg" has a red rock hare with a Swedish accent, but another hare in the same group has an American accent.
  • Mike, Lu & Og: The adults on the island have British accents, which is justified since their ancestors came from England. That still doesn't explain why Lu and Og have American accents.
  • Rainbow Dash in My Little Pony (G3) had a British accent until the "Core 7" retool. No one else has a non-American accent besides Spike.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
    • Rarity has a Trans-Atlantic accent but didn't have one as a filly, and no one in her family has anything resembling it. Though Truth in Television, as Rarity's accent is a cultivated one that you cannot have it naturally, so it'd make sense for the character to adopt it as she wanted to seem fancier and more cultured. Neither her parents (who are extremely less cultured than she is) nor her younger sister share it. Lending more credence to the idea that she adopts the accent for fashion effect, she was able to easily adopt a country dialect when trying to be more like Applejack. She also tends to on-and-off drop British terminologies into her speech ("tea and biscuits").
    • There is also the Apple Family. They all have a variety of country accents, which wouldn't be strange for a family of farmers, except that they're native to Ponyville (as in the family goes back to its founding), and no one else in Ponyville uses those accents. This is because Ponyville was only founded three generations ago, and everypony has accents from wherever they or their family moved from. It doesn't explain why every member of the Apple family sounds like they're from a different state, though; Applejack sounds like she's from Tennessee, her little sister sounds like she's from Georgia, and their grandmother sounds like she's from Pennsylvania.
  • The Octonauts could initially be justified in the crew, themselves being a Multinational Team and defaulting to British accents, but all other animals are just random or Rule of Funny in the case of Lemmy the lemon shark, the French-accented remipedes or the Ricardo Montalban-sounding dwarf lantern shark.
  • In Popples, four out of the six Sports Popples speak in different accents. Big Kick speaks with a British accent, Cuester talks with a Brooklyn accent, Dunker talks with a stereotypical African-American accent, and Pitcher talks with a Southern accent.
  • She-Ra and the Princesses of Power:
    • Angella's British accent isn't shared with any other character, not even her daughter.
    • Dana Davis's characters, Mauve Shirt Lonnie and one of the three serving staff in Dryl, have a faint accent that even other people from the same areas don't have.
    • There are many questions surrounding Madam Razz that the show never even attempts to answer. While the reason she sounds vaguely Eastern European, unlike basically everyone else on Etheria, certainly isn't a major question to leave hanging, especially compared to the whole rest of the character's deal, it's still weird. Characters who come from other planets have less unique accents.
  • The Simpsons:
    • Moe Szyzlak has Russian ancestry and a pseudo-Slavic name, yet has a heavy New York accent to make him sound harsher, and in one flashback he speaks with an Italian accent. He's also from Indiana. Another episode jokes that he's Dutch — even walking on clogs to prove it. Judging by the name Szyzlak, he could be from the Gary area/Chicago area, though he sounds as if he's from the Bronx. Anyway, in the episode "Much Apu About Nothing" he's revealed to be an illegal immigrant himself.
    • Cletus and his family all have Southern accents to make them seem more hickish, but there's never any implication they actually come from the South.
  • In Sonic the Hedgehog (SatAM), Antoine Depardieu has a French name and accent despite everyone else around him having some sort of American accent. This is unexplained, except for a throw-away line that he had training in the "Delmont Province". The accent seems to be mostly there to have him fit the stereotype of a Cheese Eating Surrender Monkey (er, coyote).
  • The Smurfs (1981) have a variety of accents, despite them all having grown up at the same time in the same village. Most notable is Painter's outrageous French accent, but there are several others, such as Clumsy's Southern drawl and Sweeper's extremely fake-sounding Cockney accent. In the 2011 movie, new character Gutsy follows tradition by being a Brave Scot.
    • The Latino dub did the same, retaining Painter's French accent and changing the English accents for different Mexican local accents most notably Farmer's Yucatecan accent (Yucatan is a farming region), Greedy's Northern Mexican accent (a region well known for its cuisine) and Taylor's "Jarocho" (Veracruzan) accent. Most Smurfs speak in Neutral Spanish though.
    • Painter's French accent is particularly egregious considering that the Smurfs live in Belgium and thus they all speak French, unless they are from the Flemish speaking part but as Peyo himself was a French-speaking Belgian this is unlikely and even if they were is still unexplained why would Painter had learn a different native tongue than the rest.
  • In the Snuffy Smith animated series Snuffy's niece Bizzy Buzz Buzz speaks in a Scandinavian or Swedish accent, the rest of her family including her mother speak in Southern accents.
  • South Park:
    • Butters has a Southern accent (to make him seem more "wholesome"), though neither of his parents share it. During his cross-dressing escapade, he's introduced as a girl from Texas.
    • Since Cartman cosplayed as Robert E. Lee and a hick sheriff, he occasionally pronounces some words with a vaguely Southern, non-rhotic accent, such as saying "authority" as "authori-tah" and "here" and "hyah."
    • Kenny lacks a Southern accent unlike the rest of his family in place of a Midwestern accent.
    • All the authority figures at South Park Elementary have strong, non-Colorado accents. Mr. Mackey and Mr. Garrison have southern accents, Principal Victoria has a Minnesota one. Garrison's is eventually explained when we meet his mother, who is also southern.
    • When the boys are looking for a replacement for Kenny, we finally hear the voice of Dogpoo, who up until that point had been a voiceless Living Prop. For whatever reason, he has an upper-crust/British accent.
  • The French dub of Superfriends bordered on Gag Dub. Batman's accent was least explicable, but the Bizarro episode had one guy with a just-got-off-the-boat North African accent and another from Belgium.
  • The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in every incarnation have totally different accents. They were raised in the sewers of New York by a Japanese man (or, depending on the continuity, his pet rat), but while Raph does have the Brooklyn accent to match the New York setting, Mikey sounds like he's from southern California, and Leo and Don sound like they're from the Midwest or otherwise speak neutral American English. Considering they lived in isolation until age 15, they probably learned how to speak from imitating the TV rather than Splinter. They all tend to use Totally Radical surfer slang when they're excited, though Word of God states this was due to Executive Meddling. They were going to speak in hip urban dialect instead.
  • The Mexican dub of Top Cat became famous due to the use of different Mexican accents for each of the cats. Probably one of the reasons behind its broad popularity in Latin America.
  • Ezekiel on Total Drama has a typical Canada, Eh? accent, even though the whole cast is Canadian and no one else has it, making him sound like a country bumpkin. Then again, that was probably the point...
  • In pretty much every incarnation of Transformers, many Cybertronians have American accents. There is never really a reason given for that, nor why they still seem to speak English even when on Cybertron. So, Outback must come from the Australian part of Cybertron.
    • Ravage spoke only a line or two in The Transformers, but his voice was pretty much just generally American. When he returned in Beast Wars, he had been rebuilt with the ability to consistently speak... with an inexplicable Russian accent.
    • In Transformers: Cybertron, Jetfire has an Australian accent despite being voiced by Canadian Brian Drummond. Ironically, the VA who voiced him with an American accent in the prior two series, Scott McNeil, is a native Australian. (One bit of supplementary material claims he picked it up from a vacation to the planet Nebulos, suggesting that (in that continuity, anyway) Nebulans have Aussie accents.
  • All over the place among the Universal-Adaptor Cast of VeggieTales. The most likely explanation is that Phil Vischer plays 50% of the characters and Mike Nawrocki another 40%, so they often need to resort to accents to keep the characters distinct. Some characters, such as the Stuffy Brit Archibald Asparagus and the very French Madame Blueberry, at least have cultural motifs and stereotypical mannerisms to go with their accents, but many other characters don't:
    • The most obvious example is Mr. Lunt, who has a very heavy Latino accent. Absolutely nothing in the series' two-decade history has indicated that the character has a Latino background, not even his name. Famously, he once claimed to have grown up in New Jersey.
    • Pa Grape speaks in a Yiddish accent, despite having debuted as the patriarch of a clan of Appalachian hillbillies. The incongruity became less obvious after the rest of his family suffered Chuck Cunningham Syndrome; Pa plays a lot of Old Testament roles, but then so do all the other characters. His occasional use of Yiddish as a Second Language coupled with the disappearance of his Southern relatives keeps him from falling too far into the trope, though whether Pa agrees with the series' explicitly-Christian values is another question...
    • Scooter has a Scottish accent. In his first appearance he was a parody of Lt. Montgomery Scott, making his accent in all subsequent appearances The Artifact. Like Mr. Lunt, there's nothing particularly Scottish about him — except in the Silly Song "Kilts and Stilts", where he gets angry when the song switches from Scotland to other cultures; and he gets especially upset when the style switches to English.
    • It happens occasionally with some other characters. Mr. Nezzer usually plays Fat, Sweaty Southerner in a White Suit roles, and the French Peas originally made their living playing Biblical villains in the style of Monty Python's French taunters, but when they play other sorts of roles their Texan and French accents come across as a bit inexplicable.

 
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Beef Meets His Rod in the Sky

Beef fell in frigid waters and his netting tangled his legs. Beef's near-death experience has caused him to hallucinate a penis in the sky that tells him that he needs to get back in the dating market, even if it is only sexual.

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