History WritersCannotDoMath / WesternAnimation

* ''WesternAnimation/TeenageMutantNinjaTurtles2003'': The episode [[Recap/TeenageMutantNinjaTurtles2003S6E16TimingIsEverything "Timing Is Everything"]], from the ''[[{retool}} Fast Forward]]'' season has some big miscalculations with the dates of the events of the show. Don and Splinter witness their past counterparts [[SuperHeroOrigin coming into contact with the ooze that mutated them]], while the post office celebrates its 100th anniversary and then on its 200th anniversary, they deliver the letter to Serling in 2105, making the Turtles' mutation taking place in 2005. Then Leo and Cody [[Recap/TeenageMutantNinjaTurtles2003S1E11TheShredderStrikesPart2 witness the Shredder surviving getting a water tower dropped at him]] and Cody checks the date and his screen reads 1993. This means somehow, the Turtles and Splinter fought the Shredder ''12 years before they mutated!'' While switching around the years (Don and Splinter being stuck in 1993 and Leo and Cody facing the Shredder in 2005) may resolve this issue a little bit, it would still result in some problems, as that would mean (if the Turtles are supposed to be newborn infants when they mutated) that the Turtles were 12 years old instead of being teenagers, as the title of the franchise indicates, in the first season. If the Turtles are supposed to be 15 in the first season, and if that season is supposed to take place in 2003, then the year when they get mutated should be 1988.

** Grandpa Phil once mentioned that his grandfather lived in 1830-1921. In the same episode, Phil turned 81, implying he was born in 1915 at the earliest (if the show was set the year it premiered) meaning that his grandfather would've died when he was 6, yet we see a flashback in one episode where his grandfather was shown to be alive and well when Phil was about 9-10. We are also told that he was alive in 1926 (five years after his supposed death). Ironically, that entire episode is about Phil making a boneheaded math error -- he thinks a "family curse" will cause him to die when he turns 81, but when he rattles off the birth and death dates to cement his point, Arnold points out that all his predecessors died when they were ''91'', not 81. Apparently the writers ''can'' do math, but didn't quite think everything through.

** In "$pringfield (Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Legalized Gambling)", Homer quotes the Scarecrow attempting to describe the Pythagorean theorem in ''Film/TheWizardOfOz'', when a man in a bathroom stall corrects him with, "That's a right triangle, you idiot!" Because the original quote uses "square roots" instead of "squares", and does not correctly describe a right triangle or an isosceles triangle, the man's correction is still incorrect.