The Ace / Western Animation

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• Slickis, Ickis' famous father from Aaahh!!! Real Monsters is this Academy's Most Esteemed Graduate and gets treated like a celebrity when he stops by for a visit. He's a champion athlete, a talented and innovative Scarer, great at public speaking, and he's such a Nice Guy everybody loves to be around him. His relationship with Ickis is strained at first, because Slickis spends more time being famous than being a Dad but they reconnect after Slickis reveals he wasn't always so skillful and reaffirms that he believes Ickis can do great things.
• Parodied in the The Addams Family (1992) episode "The Day Gomez Failed", where Gomez feels that he's run out of challenges by being so amazingly good at everything, and thus aspires to try failing at something for once. After numerous attempts at assuredly impossible tasks that he manages to succeed at in spite himself, Morticia finally points out that he'd succeeded at failing by failing to fail.
• The titular character from The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin. He's only in his teens, but he's already a highly-skilled adventurer who can think up plans and solutions on the fly, shoot down enemy planes with a slingshot, single-handedly take on monsters much bigger than him, and survive anything from falling hundreds of feet to swimming in a frozen lake. He's also an Instant Expert at piloting a submarine, hard hat diving, grungeball, equestrianism, the flute and whatever he needs to be able to do.
• Albert the Fifth Musketeer is the newest and the smallest of the musketeers, but he still is the most competent and smartest one out of the bunch.
• Amphibia: Anne Boonchuy can play tennis, dance like a boss, make advanced puppetry in a few minutes while doing slapstick, learns swordfighting extremely quickly, and can cook delicious food with fusion cuisine even when using the weird ingredients frogs eat.
• Angel Wars: Swift and Paladin as a team function as an Ace; when they get in their vehicles to attack a hellish pocket dimension while The Seven holds the entrance, they put Kira in charge of steering The Seven and Eli in charge of its point-defense turret, ordering him to take care of anything that gets past Swift and Paladin. Eli complains that nothing ever gets past them, essentially making him redundant.
• Animaniacs: Hello Nurse is not only a Hospital Hottie and Head-Turning Beauty, but also a hypercompetent Parody Sue. According to the song about her, her list of accomplishments includes winning the Tony, Nobel Prize, and Pulitzer, obtaining several P.H.Ds, playing Chopin without rehearsing, singing opera at the Met, starring as the lead role in King Lear, becoming the ambassador to China, and not smoking.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender
  • Jet is portrayed like this; he's strong, he's a good leader, he sweeps Katara off her feet, and Aang doesn't even seem to notice because he thinks Jet is awesome, too. Only Sokka is suspicious of him, and for good reason; they later find out that Jet is rather psychotic and was willing to kill innocent people in order to wipe out a few Fire Nation soldiers.
  • This trope is pretty much the point of any Avatar. The series is about Aang's journey to become The Ace. When Katara shows him some basics of waterbending, she's amazed (and a bit annoyed) at how easily he picks it up compared to how long it took her.
• Bob's Burgers has Skip Marooch, an amiable and well-traveled celebrity chef whom Bob greatly admires.
• Buddy Thunderstruck features the title character, a local celebrity racer that without fail, wins every race he's in without really trying. His capability outside the race track however, leaves a lot to be desired.
• Bugs Bunny in most of his appearances, especially when contrasted with Butt-Monkey Daffy Duck, and the Roadrunner, who is always able to avoid a supposed genius of a Coyote.
• Aldrin Pesky from The Buzz on Maggie combines this with Jerk Jock and Big Brother Bully in his attitude towards younger siblings Maggie and Pupert. He actually cares for Bella, the baby of the family. He's the captain of all the high school sports teams, has at least one in-universe fangirl swooning over him at his Burger Fool job, and his teeth sparkle when he smiles. Deconstructed partly when Maggie wants to get a better part-time job than Aldrin (or at least let everyone think she has). Aldrin discovers the ruse and is FURIOUS that she would lie about her accomplishments when he worked very hard to get where he is (a later episode confirms how insanely hard his sports training routines are), but he still offers to recommend Maggie to the manager once she admits she was wrong. Usually, he's too much of an Aloof Big Brother to even bother giving advice, possibly because he's The Unfavorite in their extended family, as Uncle Jeb blatantly favors Maggie (and later Pupert) and only compliments Aldrin when he realizes that gaining muscle mass means Aldrin can do more work.
• Captain Planet — seriously, is there any power this guy doesn't have? If pollution weren't more prevalent than kryptonite, he'd make Superman look like Aquaman.
• Captain Star of the eponymous series is called the "greatest hero any world has ever known", and a legendary captain and explorer with hundreds of worlds named after him. Despite being effectively exiled to a remote corner of the universe still manages to save the day on numerous occasions. On his Show Within a Show, he's even more so.
• A character simply known as "The Kid" from Codename: Kids Next Door. And, somewhat appropriately, he's also an Ace Pilot.
• Danger Mouse. His ending Theme Song even tells you outright: "He's The Ace! He's amazing!! He's the strongest, he's the quickest, he's the BEST!!"
• Used to its fullest in the Danny Phantom episode "Identity Crisis" where Danny splits in two, one of which embodies his heroic qualities. So much so that Large Ham speeches are an everyday occurrence for him, no tasks is too great or small for him to command—he can fight crime and vacuum his room with much pumped glee—his dramatic entrances are peppered with flashy backgrounds, imaginary wind dramatically blows his hair no matter where he is, and the music blasts triumphantly every time he appears on screen or does something over-the-top, including practicing appropriate superhero facial expressions.
• Chalky Studebaker in both series of Doug, incredibly smart, amazing athlete. However in both series, he's hinted at being a Broken Ace. Outright deconstructed in one episode when he and Doug get identical results on a test. Doug knows he didn't cheat, so the only other possibility is that Chalky cheated. After spending a day chasing Chalky through three different sports and band practice he finally corners him at his house and finds out that Chalky's been so busy with all his extracurricular activities he never had time to study. Then Chalky's dad proudly shows off his son's Trophy Room, then adds that he's got a long way to go to catch up to his brother, Cliff. Doug comments that it's a pretty big wall to fill and Chalky agrees and misses a game to re-take the test.
• One of the main focal points in The Dragon Prince is Callum's journey in becoming The Ace. He starts the series off not very confident in himself and thinking he's a failure, only to discover that his talent for observation grants him an almost limitless potential to pick up anything just by seeing it once, particularly when it involves magic.
• Cornfed Pig from Duckman fits this to a tee. He has dozens of degrees, has worked hundreds of jobs, and is a certified expert at everything. He materializes new skills whenever it is necessary or funny, from performing surgery on the fly, constructing a working helicopter from bamboo, or performing the works of Hendrix, he can do it.
• Ducktales 2017: Scrooge McDuck, much like his original and comic counterparts, is the family member who stands out as the most badass even in a family like the Duck family. He set the standard for business, adventuring, sleuthing and is the most skilled in combat of them all, beating much tougher and quicker foes even though he's very, very old. Being the richest duck in the world is living proof of this too. It's to the point that Zeus himself grew to hate Scrooge because he made the god feel inferior. Several characters, enemies included, often don't offer aid because they're so sure he won't need it and even Bradford himself, upon gaining the upper hand, opted not to throw him into the void because even he was sure he'd STILL find a way to come back somehow. Why? Because he's Scrooge McDuck.
• Ed, Edd n Eddy: Kevin is pretty much this, at least in-universe.
  • Subverted with Eddy's older brother. Throughout the series, Eddy has been building up his brother as heroic and compassionate for him, but the Grand Finale movie revealed that he's actually a sociopath who's been torturing Eddy for as long as they've been together and that Eddy made up everything he said about him. And from what we've heard, Eddy's not the only one.
• In Ellie the Ace, there's, well, Ellie, of course.
• Prince Daring of Ever After High is this. It's pretty much his ONLY purpose in life, much to the detriment of his little brother, Dexter.
• Zapp Brannigan from Futurama is a subversion. Most people think he's an amazing hero, until they meet him.
• Glitch Techs: In terms of games, Miko is shown to be better than Five on almost every level.
• Captain California in Hero High is an Ace-In-Training. Physically he fits, but he's not quite competent enough, yet. (It is a show about a school for heroes, after all).
• Hey Arnold!: Arnold Shortman can do anything. By the time of the first movie, most of the neighborhood believes he can save them from having to sell up and move. And he does.
• I.M. Weasel from I Am Weasel. It got toned down in later seasons, but his first season incarnation is very much this and played the role of foil to the resident Butt-Monkey I.R. Baboon.
• Professor Membrane in Invader Zim. Or at least he could be, if he had enough common sense to believe Dib about anything.
• Jelly Jamm: The Queen is athletic, knowledgeable and caring, and, with the help of a few Dodos, runs the Musical Factory that provides the music for the whole universe, while her husband, the King, rather plays golf and plays with the kids.
• Quack Quack the duck from Kaeloo, as a result of scientists performing experiments on him when he was younger — to the extent that he can play tennis by himself, by running from one end of the court to the other before the ball reaches.
  • Mr. Cat also qualifies as an example, though not to the same extent as Quack Quack. He's athletic, intelligent, and as proven in Episode 58, right about everything.
• The eponymous Kim Possible is a rare example of this being the protagonist herself. She's a straight-A head cheerleader who is involved in nearly every extracurricular activity, and she is quite savvy and can learn how to pilot something in just a few seconds. She can do anything, indeed.
• Mei Ling in Kung Fu Panda: Secrets of the Furious Five. She was the top student at the martial arts academy where Crane worked as the janitor and is a true blue friend who helped the underconfident bird achieve his dream to enroll in the school.
• Experiment 262 from Lilo & Stitch: The Series is a superhero compared to the other experiments. He was originally designed as a war weapon, but Jumba screwed up the formula and created a being with no capacity for evil. Jumba considers him a failure and locked him away whenever company came around. Oh, and his name actually is Ace.
• The titular character of The Life and Times of Juniper Lee. Besides being the Te Xuan Ze, June plays guitar in her brothers' rock band, is an honor student and part of several clubs at school and seems fairly popular.
• Rick Thunderbolt of Ōban Star-Racers is famous, gorgeous (complete with waist-length black hair and Cool Shades,) beloved, one of the world's best racers — and knows it. Over the course of the show's first arc, he is crippled so he can never race again, and ends up as a mentor figure to Molly, teaching her everything he knows so that she can succeed where he did not.
• The titular duo of Phineas and Ferb. They're so exceptionally talented in all fields that they can accomplish literally just about anything imaginable — and will — if they feel it can keep them occupied for a day.
  • Isabella can be thought of as this too, considering she is easily able to overcome nearly impossible physical and mental challenges on a day-to-day basis just to earn Fireside Girl patches.
• In one episode of The Proud Family, Trudy hires a housekeeper called "Renee" who is good at almost everything. Trudy gets jealous because she feels that she doesn't fit to everyone's standards and she feels that she has been replaced, so she decides to let her go because she's too "perfect."
• In Rambo: The Force of Freedom, the titular hero's Action Figure File Card makes it plain:
  "His strength and skill allow him to accomplish dangerous missions that no ordinary man would attempt. Martial arts, weapons, explosives — Rambo is Master of All!"
• Jet Propulsion from Ready Jet Go! Jet is a talented singer and dancer, and knows a whole lot about space. He's also the leader of his group and makes friends easily.
  • Sunspot, Jet's pet is this too. Sunspot is good at pretty much everything.
• Vince LaSalle from Recess. T.J. was one in the early season one episodes. Played with in "Here Comes Mr. Perfect" with Jarad Smith, a new student who ends up being the best at everything, though deconstructed when it's revealed that he doesn't have many friends because he's better than every other student at everything.
• Regular Show has Skips. In general, he's good at everything.
  • Deconstructed in one episode, where Skips is shown to be horrendously computer-impaired.
  • Also, Rigby's little brother Don fits this trope perfectly. He is a successful accountant who is a large contrast to his groundskeeper brother. (Who isn't even that good at it.)
• Hunter from Road Rovers is kind of a mix of this, The Hero and Idiot Hero. Nothing bad ever happens to him and he's always cracking jokes during missions.
• In Rocket Power, Otto Rocket is definitely the most skilled out of his friends being good at nearly every sport they compete in. Otto has won many competitions, received many awards, and was even sponsored by a famous company in an episode. He was even praised by Tony Hawk himself for being a skilled skateboarder. Unfortunately, due to this, Otto believes he better than everyone (including his own friends) at sports leading to his MASSIVE ego. It also doesn't help that he is extremely competitive and HATES losing which sorta brings him into Broken Ace territory at times. Don't worry, he usually learns his lesson at the time if the plot involves him (which, due to him technically being The Protagonist, it happens a lot).
• Dr. Lucy Carmichael of Rugrats. She is completely awesome at everything she turns her hand to, such as cooking, medicine, and making lamps. During the episode that introduces Lucy and her husband Randy, and their children, Alisa, Buster, Edwin, and Susie, it's a running gag how Didi is constantly discovering new things to admire about her new friend and being totally blown away and a little intimidated.
• Brian Boitano is presented as The Ace on South Park, despite never appearing on the show. According to the musical number about him in South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, he has magical fire-breath and once punched out Khublai Khan. He does appear in the 1995 "Spirit of Christmas" short, though only to give An Aesop speech.
• Spongebob Squarepants has 4 of them. SpongeBob is this compared to Squidward, as are Mr. Krabs to Plankton, Squilliam to Squidward and Sandy to basically everyone.
  • Aren't you forgetting someone? Smitty Werbenjagermanjensen! He was Number 1!
• Jack Royal from Squirrel Boy.
• Stressed Eric lives next door to the Perfect family. Ray Perfect is Eric's coworker and excels everywhere that Eric fails dismally.
• Summer Memories: Jason's friend Ronnie is ridiculously good at everything he does. His hair is always flawless, everyone likes him, and he has so many connections.
• TaleSpin has at least two examples (one appearance each):
  • Whistlestop Jackson, hero to millions!
  • And the appropriately-named Ace London! ("You got that right!") He's good, knows it, makes a big point of it, and unsurprisingly, gets on Baloo's nerves as a result of his insufferable attitude.
  • A possible third example played with is Rick Sky. Ace Pilot and squadron commander during TaleSpin's equivalent to World War I, and a living legend. Except for the fact he disappeared with a load of silver vital to the war effort and was branded a traitor. He claims that he really didn't steal the silver after all, and instead crashed on a glacier with his squadron and was trapped there for a couple decades. Of course he doesn't help his case when he steals the Sea Duck. But he did it to try and get the silver back. Any disillusionment Baloo felt over these events is pretty thoroughly dashed when Rick and his recovered squadron willingly take on Don Karnage in what's implied to be a Suicide Mission to give Baloo time to escape with the silver, ultimately clearing their names. The Ace indeed.
• Aqualad is portrayed this way in his debut episode of Teen Titans.
• Total Drama
  • Alejandro might be the most prominent example of the "Ace" part, taking it to Master of All levels.
  • As part of being a perfectionist Courtney prides herself in being a straight 'A' student. Her Island bio claims she's a published author, having written the award-winning book Total Triumph for Teens and that her bedroom is covered with trophies, ribbons, and plaques; she's apparently never lost anything in her life before Total Drama.
  • Duncan excels at everything that involves breaking the law, be that theft, vandalism, stripping vehicles, hand-to-hand combat, or pretending to cry. Heather once even calls him an Evil Genius.
  • Zoey comes to learn she has exceptional athletic ability after her Commando Zoey phase, being able to perform difficult acrobatic maneuvers, having Improbable Aiming Skills, and being stronger than her size would suggest.
  • While he is incredibly quiet, B is shown to be an incredibly competent individual in challenges, and often led the team to victory.
  • Bowie is shown to be an incredibly strong strategist who manages to play the double agent incredibly well, clearly having enough sway and cunning to orchestrate the eliminations of four contestants. Not only that, despite never winning a challenge, he often came close to winning them. This also applies at his high school where he won gold for various sports such as track-and-field, basketball and wrestling and was popular enough to be prom king and queen.
• Mei in Turning Red is quite academically skilled and talented^note She's getting As in all of her classes, she's musically talented and is also fluent in French and has the ego to back it all up. However, all this pressure to be perfect gets to her after her transformation, as she gets tired of being her mother's "perfect little Mei-Mei" all the time.
• Underdog — completely invincible to all natural physical harm, Super-Strength taken up to eleven, speed of lightning, treats bullets like they're raindrops, destroys bad guys' vehicles (from cars to train to tanks) just by standing there doing nothing and letting them crash when they hit him, takes out monsters in one or two punches like they're toys, and loves to make dramatic entrances where something gets destroyed and he declares "There's no need to fear!/Underdog is here!" The catch? His powers are the effect of a Super Serum pill, and he often spends half the episode dangerously weak if not nigh-helpless until he's able to take it and re-charge, which makes for an interesting balance of strength and vulnerability.
• The Venture Bros.:
  • Brock Samson is a Parody Sue running off of Testosterone Poisoning. It helps that he picks up some character depth along the way.
  • Jonas Venture Jr. also qualifies... and only gets more infuriating as the series progresses.
  • Jonas Venture Sr. too, albeit posthumously. Everyone who ever knew him considered him a god among men. Even Rusty, who knows full well what a self-absorbed asshat he was, can't bring himself to break out of his father's shadow.
  • Dr. Henry Killinger takes this up to eleven while still playing it straight. Whenever he appears, expect his actions to result in a major change in the Venture universe. So far, he has completely rebuilt the Monarch's criminal organization while reuniting him with Dr. Girlfriend. He then rebuilds Venture Industries to its former glory almost overnight while giving Rusty Venture a much-needed Heel Realization. Then, after the Guild of Calamitous Intent is thrown into chaos by the Sovereign killing off most of the Council of Thirteen, he kills the Investors and re-establishes the Guild with the surviving members and the Revenge Society. He is terrifyingly good at what he does.
• Played straight in The Weekenders with minor character and Lor's crush, Thompson Oberman. Nicely lampshaded by Tino and Carver:
  Carver: He's a jock and a nerd!
  Tino: Yeah, way to ruin the curve, Thompson.

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