Plagiarism In Fiction / Western Animation

Fictional depictions of plagiarism in Western Animation.

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• Alvin and the Chipmunks:
  • In "Court Action", to avoid having to write a report about a sport of his choosing, Alvin steals an old report from Simon's. Unfortunately, he forgets to check which sport Simon wrote about.
  • The first time the Chipettes appeared occurred when the three main characters found out - accidentally - that this other band was using their name. Also accidentally. While Dave did the smart thing and called his lawyer, Alvin decides to wager the name. (He loses, because the girls cheat.) The issue was resolved when the girls actually try to perform under the name, to an audience expecting Alvin's band. Uh-oh. Fortunately for them, Alvin is very forgiving, jumping in and introducing them as guest musicians, who they quickly call the Chipettes.
• Arthur's friend Francine accidentally plagiarizes a school report about Pilgrim food off not-Wikipedia, not knowing what plagiarism is until after she hands it in. Once her older sister Catherine finds out what she did, she enlightens Francine and advises she tell Mr. Ratburn. Francine later has a Guilt-Induced Nightmare of the original author of the article coming after for her, and decides to confess and present Mr. Ratburn with a paper she actually wrote, at which point he tells her that two crimes happen when someone plagiarizes: The original author is robbed of credit and the person who plagiarizes is robbed of learning something. When Francine gets a "B" on the assignment she did herself, she kisses the paper. Arthur is confused at her pleasure, but she's happy because she earned the "B".
• The Aqua Teen Hunger Force episode "Chicken and Beans" has Shake becoming jealous that Meatwad's eponymous song grew so popular that it made him a celebrity, so he decides to write his own song titled "Bruschetta Nights". However, it later turns out Shake actually plagiarized the lyrics to the Scorpions' "Big City Nights", for which he ends up getting sued for copyright infringement.
• In the Batman: The Animated Series episode, "If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Rich?", Daniel Mockridge takes credit for the creation of a video game called The Riddle of the Minotaur, created by his programer, Edward Nigma, and denies him any kind of royalties since he's under a work-for-hire contract. This comes back to bite him in the butt as Nigma takes on the persona, the Riddler, to take his revenge. Batman and Robin end up saving Mockridge, but Robin laments how legally, he's still is gonna get off scot free and make a fortune off of the game. Batman points out that may not be the case, since they were not able to catch the Riddler, meaning Mockridge may have his fortune, but will now live in a constant state of paranoia over Nigma coming back to possibly finish the job.
  Bruce Wayne: How much is a good nights' sleep worth? Now there's a Riddle for you.
• From the Batman Beyond episode "Sentries of the Last Cosmos", Simon Harper is eventually revealed to have stolen the credit for creating the titular video game franchise from it's actual creator, Eldon Michaels. He tries to have Michaels killed to cover it up before the truth is exposed.
• Boy Girl Dog Cat Mouse Cheese: The episode "Scientifically Impossible" has Girl passing off one of Mouse's inventions as her science project without him knowing. Upon finding out about it, he gets back at her by sabotaging the next one that she steals to enter in the school science fair, although it ends up almost destroying everything in sight if not for the two of them working together to stop it.
• Dastardly & Muttley in Their Flying Machines: "Magnificent Muttley" episode "Leonardo Da Muttley" featured a King offering a reward to whoever invented a flying machine. Dastardly stole two of Muttley's designs but both resulted in Dastardly believing he should suggest Leonardo to invent the parachute.
• Family Guy:
  • One of the tangent gags shows Einstein working in a patent office. A man walks in wanting to patent his theory of relativity, and Einstein knocks him out and steals it.
  • He's later shown doing the same thing to God, after he invented shrinky dinks.
  • Another episode has a Cutaway Gag involving a police officer named Officer Reese arriving at the scene of an accident, where the two barely-alive victims mention that one's peanut butter got in another's chocolate and vice-versa. After Reese tastes the chocolate/PB mixture, he promptly shoots them both so he can steal the recipe.
  • An accidental version with Brian's (terrible) novel Faster Than the Speed of Love, which is 99% similar to the Iron Eagle movies that he claims to have never seen. His attempts to prove that his novel is original only make things worse, such as when he mentions a drug-smuggling ring (which, as Lois points out between hysterical laughter, was the plot of Iron Eagle III).
  • In "Brian's Play", one of Stewie's criticisms about Brian's play A Passing Fancy is that in addition to having a simplistic plot filled with cliches, it contains numerous bits of writing stolen from other works that Brian claims to have never seen or read, one of them being a line from an episode of Seinfeld.
• In Futurama's episode "Anthology of Interest I", Fry discovers the "Fry Hole":
  Fry: So what do you nerds want?
  Nichelle Nichols: It's about that rip in space-time that you saw.
  Stephen Hawking: I call it a "Hawking Hole".
  Fry: No fair! I saw it first!
  Stephen Hawking: Who is The Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?
• In the Gargoyles episode "Cloud Fathers", Xanatos captures Coyote the Native American trickster with Coyote, a robot minion that gets destroyed every episode he appears in. Coyote says that he should sue Xanatos "for trademark infringement." Subverted in that Xanatos himself considers the robot a tribute.
• In an episode of Hey Arnold!, Phoebe steals a poem from a book and passes it off as her own until the guilt drives her insane.
• Jacob Two-Two: The episode "Jacob Two-Two and the Surprise Disguise" has Fish and Fowl's plot of attempting to heist copies of Jacob's father's latest Amazing Ronald book and pass it off as their own work, with Jacob managing to foil them.
• Jimmy Two-Shoes: The episode "Misery Hearts" has Heloise reading a new romance novel, only to find out that the author, who happens to be Beezy under the Pen Name "Sir Gideon Writesalot", never finished it. She is then made by him to fulfill all sorts of ridiculous and humiliating requests to try and make him motivated and inspired enough to do it, until she finds out that Beezy actually didn't write the book and had just glued a picture of himself over that of the real author, Samy. Heloise is not pleased to say the least and forces Samy to finally finish his work by threatening to drop him into a shark-infested pool.
  Jimmy: (After failing multiple times to write a novel) I've tried, but I don't think I can ever be a writer like you.
  Beezy: It's a lot faster if you just glue your picture to the back of someone else's book. (Glues a picture of himself to another one of Samy's books) Presto! I'm an author.
• Jonny Quest: The Real Adventures: "The Haunted Sonata". For generations, the Duntchecks lived the life of Royalties Heir because Franz Duntcheck stole a sonata from its real author, a woman named Anna Kafka who, because of her gender, was initially afraid of not being appreciated. Once the truth was revealed, Irina Kafka, as the current heiress of the real author, got the money.
• The Kids from Room 402: Vinnie Nasta made a habit of presenting his big brother Tony's reports as his own but the teacher always remembers having already evaluated them back when Tony was her student. One time included a contest entry, which Vinnie checked to be sure Tony wasn't her student back then. She was a juror for the contest.
• King of the Hill:
  • In one episode, after Bobby was given full credit from an essay that Peggy wrote and considered a good writer, he took her Musings papers and hand it to his classmates to give them good essay grades.
  • In another episode, Randy Travis stole one of Peggy's song ideas and turned it into a hit. Peggy's Know-Nothing Know-It-All boasting came back to bite her in the ass when nobody, not even Hank, were willing to believe her complaints.
• Littlest Pet Shop (2012):
  • In the episode "The Big Feathered Parade," Blythe tries to enter some designs she made into the titled parade, but gets rejected by the judges because she's too young. She then runs into another designer, Ramon, who admires Blythe's designs so much that he decides to steal them and use them in the parade. Luckily, he gets caught in the end and Blythe gets full credit for the designs.
  • Ramon tried the same trick in the episode "Plane it on Rio," when Blythe enters Carnival.
• An episode of The Looney Tunes Show has Daffy learn that Bugs got his vast fortune by inventing the carrot peeler. Jealous, Daffy steals Bugs' plans for an automatic carrot peeler and becomes rich, but the untested machines have a dangerous flaw. It could be dealt with, as explained in the seventh step in the plans, but Daffy was too lazy to read beyond step three. As a result, Daffy gets chased out of town by people with Torches and Pitchforks.
• The Loud House: In "Child's Play", Luna and her band, the Moon Goats, decide to perform for toddlers to raise money for a new speaker system. They have trouble coming up with toddler-themed songs, so they decide to copy songs Luna's baby sister Lily sings at random. It's not until the Loud parents take Lily with them to Aunt Ruth's that the Moon Goats are forced to come up with original material.
• Miraculous Ladybug:
  • In "Mr Pigeon," Chloe takes a picture of Marinette's design blueprints for a hat and hires someone else to make it. This backfires on her when it turns out that they did copy Marinette's design perfectly—including Marinette's signature on the brim.
  • The conflict of the episode "Silencer" is kicked off by producer Bob Roth ripping off Kitty Section's video (which they submitted to Bob for a contest which turned out to be a scam) for use by EDM disk jockey XY, and subsequently mocking Luka (the group's guitarist) and Marinette (their costume designer) when they sneak into the TV studio to call him out, which enrages Luka to the point where Hawk Moth is able to akumatize him into Silencer.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • In the episode "Rarity Takes Manehattan", Rarity lets Suri Polomare, an old friend who happens to have entered the same fashion contest as her, have a bolt of a new fabric Rarity had developed. Suri promptly uses the fabric (and the hoofwork of her Beleaguered Assistant Coco Pommel) to copy Rarity's dress designs, forcing a stressed-out Rarity to improvise new outfits and threatening her relationship with her friends. Fortunately, Rarity not only wins the contest, but Suri's jerkassery drives Coco to quit and side with Rarity.
  • In "Friendship University", the Flim-Flam Brothers somehow came into the possession of Twilight's coursebook for her Friendship School, but skipped every other page so that they could teach the same thing in "half the time". And make ponies pay for it, of course.
• Randy Cunningham: 9th Grade Ninja: Bash entered one of Viceroy's inventions as his own at the Science fair. His grade was a C, which he believes to be a number.
• The Simpsons:
  • "The Day the Violence Died"; Roger Meyers Sr ripped off the idea for Itchy from a guy named Chester Lampwick; when exposed, his son tried to justify it:
    Roger Meyers Jr.: Animation is built on plagiarism! If it weren't for someone plagiarizing The Honeymooners, we wouldn't have The Flintstones. If someone hadn't ripped off Sergeant Bilko, there'd be no Top Cat, Huckleberry Hound, Chief Wiggum, Yogi Bear? Hah! Andy Griffith, Edward G. Robinson, Art Carney.
  • And ironically, the elder Meyers was a victim too, it seems, the U.S. Post Office having stolen his "Manic Mailman" idea for the Mr. Zip design.
  • "Fraudcast News": Millhouse, who has joined the staff of Lisa's newspaper, The Red Dress Press, admits he fabricated and copied content from other newspapers. The story he wrote about Baghdad was also a fraud. He was in Basra.
  • In "The Wizard of Evergeen Terrace", Homer dreamed about becoming an inventor. After some ideas of his were rejected, he "invented" a chair with a special mechanism that prevented him from falling but he later found out Thomas Edison invented but didn't patent it. Homer and Bart went to the Thomas Edison Museum to destroy Edison's chair so there'd be no evidence Homer didn't invent it. There, they had a change of mind and left without destroying anything. Unfortunately, they also left Homer's electronic hammer, which, unlike what Marge thought, caught on. Thomas Edison was credited for the hammer and his "already wealthy" heirs got even more millions.
  • "Flaming Moe's", as the beverage was called after Moe stole it from Homer. (Although, as Lionel Hutz later tells Homer and Marge, you can't copyright a drink.)
  • "Dial N for Nerder":
    Bart: I didn't know there was a national park here.
    Lisa: You wrote a report on it last week.
    Bart: The internet wrote it. I just handed it in.
  • In "Krusty Gets Kancelled", Bart points out that the "patented Gabbo crank call" is a bit stolen from Krusty. Lisa tops him by pointing out that "Krusty stole it from Steve Allen", and this is confirmed when Krusty realizes the call was a trick — "If this is anyone but Steve Allen, you're stealing my bit!" Grampa Simpson even pointed out that everything is stolen nowadays, like the fax machine (which, to him, is a waffle iron with a phone attached).
  • And that was neither the first nor the last time. In "Homie the Clown":
    Woman: [over intercom] George Carlin on three.
    Krusty: [answers phone] Yeah?... Lawsuit? Oh, come on. My "Seven Words You Can't Say on TV" bit was entirely different from your "Seven Words You Can't Say on TV" bit. ...So I'm a thief, am I? Well, excuuuse me! [to his accountant] Give him ten grand.
    Woman: Steve Martin on four.
    Krusty: Ten grand.
  • And in "Who Shot Mr. Burns", Krusty accuses Smithers of stealing a joke from him, only for Sideshow Mel to remind Krusty that he stole it from last night's episode of a show called Pardon my Zinger. (This is actually a clue that clears Smithers; the episode aired around the same time that Burns was shot, so if Smithers was at home watching the show, he couldn't have been the shooter.)
  • The episode "Papa Don't Leech" has Lurleen Lumpkin reuniting with her estranged father Royce after thirty years, celebrating the moment with her new song "My Daddy's Back". However, Royce not only abandons her again immediately afterward, he steals and rewrites his daughter's song into "America's Back", giving it to the Dixie Chicks to sing on live TV and telling them that he was the one who wrote it. Lurleen is absolutely furious with her father, and the Dixie Chicks are displeased enough at Royce for having lied to them that they gang up on him and beat him up.
• In The Smurfs (1981) episode "Harmony Steals The Show", Harmony was accused of plagiarism when his accuser presented the argument before a judge that he wrote an original symphony for the Smurf to use as his own under a signed contract. Harmony was cleared of that charge when it is revealed that his accuser had plagiarized pieces of other musicians' works to create his "original" symphony.
• South Park:
  • In "Weight Gain 4000", Cartman wins the essay contest, only for Wendy to reveal at the end that the paper is just Walden with Henry David Thoreau's name replaced with his. The townspeople don't care,^note since the paper is what got Kathie Lee Gifford to come to town, only for her to flee when Mr. Garrison tried to shoot her for upstaging him when they were kids and she expresses her anger.
    Wendy: I bet if Walden was a sitcom, you'd all know what it was!
  • "Christian Rock Hard" has Cartman forming a Christian rock band with Tolkien and Butters called Faith + 1, with their music consisting of songs ripped off from other artists that have been rewritten to include Jesus's name. While nobody catches on, it does make the music executives backing them question if the band is really in it for God and not the money when they point out that their songs' lyrics make the boys look like they are actually in love with Jesus, with Cartman becoming defensive about it.
• Thundercats Roar: The episode "Panthro Plagarized!" has Vultureman trying to take over Third Earth with his latest invention, the gravity pincer. While the Thundercats work to stop him, Panthro is more upset over the fact that said invention is a ripoff of his gravity fork, which Vultureman stole the plans for while raiding their trash. Despite Vultureman's claims of having had the idea first (and later trademarking out of spite), Panthro becomes determined to get him to confess the truth, going so far as threatening to drop Third Earth's moon onto the planet's surface if he doesn’t (which to everyone's relief turns out to be just a bluff). It works, ending in Vultureman calling Panthro insane for having gone to such lengths and running off hoping that the latter ends up killing himself with one of his future inventions.
• Viva Piñata: The episode "Artic Invasion" has a new band called The Pengums taking Piñata Island by storm with their hit songs, with Hudson and Langston trying to ruin them for their own respective reasons (Hudson because he considers them hacks who stole his fame and Langston because the ice and snow they brought with them has rendered Piñata Central inoperable). In their attempts to do so, they inadvertently discover that not only have the Pengums been lip-syncing their music the whole time, they also ripped off all their songs from the band they used to be roadies to who wrote them four years prior under different names. The Pengums' fans are less than pleased with either of these revelations.

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