Robot Chicken is guilty of flip-flopping between shallow and half-hearted parodies or making some pretty deep-cut parodies and references, but the former jokes tend to outnumber the latter in terms of frequency and quantity.
- Parodied in a sketch where Seth explained that, due to Robot Chicken's production schedule, they would sometimes spoof movies that would be released by the time the episode was out, but know nothing about while in production. The example was Into the Blue, and the "parody" consisted of Jessica Alba and Paul Walker staring at the camera and saying generic things like "We are in a boat", "I wear a bikini", "I have nice abs", etc.
- Goku carrying a handgun in one Christmas skit. Guns of almost any caliber are inane, insane jokes in the Dragon Ball universe. (Unless the target is unfortunate enough to have their guard down) Goku as a kid kicked missiles and rockets back at the ones who launched them. Buu's puppy and the farmer who greeted Raditz in the pilot are about it for gunfire casualties in almost 300 episodes.
- An episode had the Nerd hanging out with the Doctor, and a lot of the jokes revolved around the show's effects being cheap. It seems like the writers of the sketch only watched the Pre-Revival era of the show, but even that is questionable considering the Doctor in the sketch didn't look like any of the ones in the series (the closest resemblance being Peter Capaldi).
- The Harry Potter sketch that parodied Breaking Bad took random scenes from the latter without any indication of knowledge of their context. Examples include Dumbledore (who is the stand-in for Walter White) being in his underwear for no explained reason (Walter only did it in one episode because he didn't want his clothes smelling like a meth lab), Ron getting half of his face blown off in a lab accident (when in the scene it was spoofing, the explosion was intentional so Walt could get rid of Gus), and the severed-head-turtle bomb leading to Dumbledore dying from getting shrapnel in his abdomen (which not only wasn't done by Walter, but wasn't the cause of his death either). It also misrepresented the former, examples being Dumbledore crying that teaching high school is all he's done with his life when in the books it's made clear he does have a long list of achievements to his name and Dumbledore lying to Harry and Hermoine that magic "fixes anything" after Ron diesnote when it's repeatedly made clear in the books that death is something no magic can fix (the closest is the Resurrection Stone, but even that just brings back their spirits).
- The Team Fortress 2 parody in Season 6, despite the game having been out for 5 years and still extremely popular by the time the episode aired. The skit starts out promising with a recreation of the class selection screen (albeit missing a third of the classes even with the Nerd's presence), then from there it deviates heavily from the source material. The Demoman and Pyro are generic white mercs, when their defining traits is that the Demoman is the Token Minority and the Pyro is The Faceless; the characters all have realistic weapons, some taken from Halo, when the game is well-known for its cartoonish art style; the Soldier and Medic both wield SMGs, a weapon used only by the Sniper; and the Medic shoots the Nerd to death when they're on the same team - friendly fire is possible in-game, but it needs to be turned on by a server admin, and it never is due to the game's griefer population. A minor one is that the camera doesn't switch to third-person when the Nerd is killed.
- One sketch spoofing Pokémon: The Original Series had Ash wondering what it's like for Pikachu to be inside his Poké Ball. Except that Pikachu never goes inside a Poké Ball because he hates being inside it. They never bothered to correct this in two later sketches, one of which had Pikachu inside his Poké Ball as Ash used it to play tennis with Misty in retaliation for Pikachu urinating on Ash's carpet, and the resulting motion sickness gets Pikachu to throw up. In canon, a Poké Ball places the Pokémon in a virtual environment, so the ball being shaken up on the outside would have no effect on the Pokémon inside. Ironically, the first sketch did semi-accurately parody this aspect.
- One sketch shows the result of what happens when a Power Ranger falls ill and can't properly form their Megazord. The rangers in question are the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, yet the Megazord seen is from Lightspeed Rescue. In the show itself, should a Ranger be out of commission, the other rangers mainly rely on their individual Zords instead of combining them; furthermore, the skit depicts the Lightspeed Megazord having an arm missing; the way this Megazord is structured, it would be missing both arms and the chest (they did have an alternate walker mode used to put out fires).
- During another sketch that involves showing where 90's characters are now, they feature Mesogog from Power Rangers: Dino Thunder working at a fast-food establishment. Only problem though, Dino Thunder came out in 2004. The fact he's shown fighting the original Mighty Morphin' team further rubs salt into the wound of any Power Rangers fan.
- One G.I. Joe sketch parodied G.I. Joe Extreme, but had them as an elite unit of the present-day team brought in to thwart COBRA's attempt to influence America's youth, rather than a new generation of Joes fighting SKAR. More than likely the writers weren't familiar enough with the show to do an accurate parody, but noticed "Extreme" in its title and decided to just make Totally Radical '90s jokes instead of tackling the show and toyline's actual flaws.
- Whenever a Toy Story sketch is shown, it will usually take place after Toy Story 3 but ignore its ending and have the toys continue living with Andy. This was excusable during the infamous "Toy Story 4" sketch in Season 5 (no relation to the 2019 film) because it would've been written before 3 even came out, but the third sketch in Season 8 not only has them living with Andy, one character accuses the toys of strapping the Big Bad of 3 to a truck to teach him a lesson, something the toys weren't involved in and would have no knowledge ofnote , indicating a bare knowledge of the source material. This one couldn't even get Andy's age in that movie right, because he's inexplicably a kid again.
- Another sketch had the toys being replaced by a high-end gaming PC who, before killing them one by one, offers them the chance to play the newest Mario Kart. Given that Nintendo doesn't develop or publish PC games, meaning any of their games would require an emulator or a fanmade port to be played on a PC, using the name of another game released around that time would've been more appropriate.
- The infamous Homestar Runner sketch
, which features such oddities and inaccuracies as the King of Town having an Irish accent and Strong Bad repeatedly saying "crap" when the current shorts don't have him say it as often as previous shorts did. - The Caillou/Pacific Rim sketch (which came from the same episode as the Homestar Runner sketch) gets many details about Caillou wrong. For example, the sketch has the kaiju (dressed up as Caillou) going to what appears to be elementary school, even though Caillou goes to preschool, a detail even people who barely know anything about the show will know. Aside from Caillou, none of the other kaiju are dressed up as/resemble other characters from the show, such as Miss Martin, Caillou's teacher. In her place is a generic old lady teacher. The sets in the sketch also don't resemble the abstract, colorful environments in the show and instead are very generic-looking.
- One sketch had a bunch of movies being made based on board games. One of them was Slip N Slide, which is not a board game.
- In the Zombie Idol sketch, two of the singers are William Hung and Yoko Ono, neither of which were actually dead in real life at the time. It seems the Robot Chicken writers just wanted to make jokes about their reputations as Dreadful Musicians, and didn't bother to check (or care) if they were dead or not.
- One Scooby-Doo skit has Fred and Daphne try to come up with their own original catchphrases, being jealous of Shaggy and Velma. While the original series has poked fun at Fred not having a catchphrase before, "Jeepers" has been associated with Daphne for decades.
- One joke set in an orphanage reveals Pippi Longstocking is Little Orphan Annie's imaginary alter-ego, a joke on them both being famous red-haired orphans. While Pippi usually gets threatened with being sent to an orphanage, she's rarely actually portrayed as an orphan, as her father is alive, just overseas. Made all the more egregious in that there is another famous orphan with red hair, and is even named Anne, that could've worked better for the joke.
- Several of the show's Hey Arnold! sketches that feature Helga Pataki show her being defined solely by her hidden crush on Arnold, to the point that one sketch that ends with Arnold being killed has her declare her obsession cured and that she can finally "start becoming a more three-dimensional character". Many fans of the show would argue that Helga was actually the most multi-dimensional character in a show that already made strides to flesh out as many of its characters as it could, with Helga's Jerkass nature, her crush on Arnold, and her complicated relationship with her family all getting multiple episodes dedicated to explaining them (most famously in "Helga on the Couch"), and treating her like her crush on Arnold is all that she has going for her is a surface-level take at best.
