Age Lift / Western Animation

• Alvin and the Chipmunks: A minor example, since Alvin, Simon and Theodore are triplets, but in one episode of the '80s cartoon series, Alvin mentions that he's the oldest, having been born five minutes before Simon. In the novelization of the 2007 film and in the 2015 CGI series, however, Simon is said to be the oldest while Alvin is the middle triplet.
• Batman: The Brave and the Bold:
  • Mark Desmond (Blockbuster) as the same age as Billy Batson (and in the same school), to draw parallels with them both having a superstrong, adult alter ego.
  • The Outsiders (Black Lightning, Katana and Metamorpho) are depicted as teenagers under the tutelage of Batman instead of adult peers.
• The Batman:
  • Traditionally, the Penguin is older than Batman. However, the Penguin is around the same age as Batman.
  • Alfred appears to be middle-aged rather than elderly, though his exact age isn't stated. The same can be said for James Gordon.
  • While Barbara Gordon is around the same age that she's usually depicted as (late teens-ish), she's a few years older than Dick Grayson here, though she also was older than Dick in the comics until a retcon made them the same age.
  • Poison Ivy is a teenager in this show, and a friend of Barbara Gordon before her transformation.
  • Ellen Yindel from Batman: The Dark Knight Returns was older than her mid-20s, but also clearly not as old as the 55-year old version of Bruce Wayne depicted in that story. Here, Ellen Yin is around Bruce's age when he's 25.
• Caillou is bald because in the original books he was meant to be a baby barely over 1 year old. The cartoon aged him up to 4 but kept his lack of hair.
• Carmen Sandiego:
  • Carmen herself explicitly mentions she was found by V.I.L.E. as a baby twenty years prior to the Poitiers job, placing her around 20-21 years old. Most depictions of Carmen Sandiego (from Where on Earth Is Carmen Sandiego? and the franchise in general) has generally shown her as being in her early 30s.
  • Zack from Where on Earth Is Carmen Sandiego? was a young teenager. In the Netflix series, he's old enough to drive and pilot various vehicles, usually acting as Carmen's Getaway Driver.
• Castlevania: Alucard in the games is an Immortal Dhampir who is thousands of years old. In the show, since Dracula and Lisa met and married just a couple of decades ago, he’s only 20. He appears in his correct age in the Sequel Series set centuries after the first show though.
• Castlevania: Nocturne:
  • Maria in Rondo of Blood was just 12 years old. Here, she is clearly at the least a young adult, 16 or 17 at the most.
  • Juste in Harmony of Dissonance is a young man with an Alucard’s esque Long-Haired Pretty Boy appearance. Here he’s much older and grizzled being Richer’s grandfather meaning he’s in his late 60s at the very least. His long white hair is a sign of age here, rather than stylistic Author Appeal of the Kojima artwork.
• DC Animated Universe:
  • Batman: The Animated Series:
    • Robin is usually depicted as being somewhere in his early to mid teens. B: TAS portrayed him as being a young adult who’s in college because the show’s censor had strict guidelines about placing minors in danger, but the series explains that he has been under Bruce Wayne's care for some time and is about to go off on his own. Later on, when he becomes Nightwing, they bring in Tim Drake to be Robin, and make him closer to the traditional age.
    • Prior to B: TAS, Barbara Gordon was already an adult when she became Batgirl and Dick Grayson was still a teenager as Robin. Starting here and going through other versions, including getting Ret-Canon to the comics, they're around the same age.
    • Much like Dick and Barbara, Zatanna is presented much closer in age to Bruce than she originally was (pre-Crisis, she was a teen starting out when Bruce had been Batman for a while) — and much like with Dick and Barbara, Bruce and Zee started getting presented around the same age too, even getting Ret-Canon to the comics as well.
  • Superman: The Animated Series had a loose version of the classic Kara Zor-El Supergirl, but unlike the pre-Crisis version, she was technically older than Clark, though put in cryogenic suspension, so she's still physically and mentally a teen when Superman rescues her. Like with Barbara's age, it was Ret-Canon to the comics when The Supergirl from Krypton (2004) introduced a post-Crisis Kara.
  • Batman Beyond would adapt the obscure Batman villain Spellbinder, but unlike the comics, due to the future nature of the show, Spellbinder is younger than Bruce Wayne instead of around the same age.
  • Justice League:
    • In the comics, Vandal Savage became immortal 50,000 years ago. Here, it was 25,000.
    • In the comics, Solomon Grundy's past life as Cryus Gold happened in the 19th Century. In this version, his past life as Gold was as a Prohibition era gangster.
    • Chronos is still an adult, but like with Spellbinder, the comics David Clinton was a present-day character, whereas the Clinton of the DCAU is from the Batman Beyond era, which would make him a kid at most during the JLU era.
• DC Super Hero Girls 2019:
  • Much like the original web series, the TV show is a High School AU that takes a multitude of characters of varying ages in the comics like Wonder Woman, Batgirl, Supergirl, Zatanna, Bumblebee, Catwoman, Harley Quinn, Poison Ivy, The Flash, Green Lantern, Green Arrow, Hawkman, Lois Lane and Aqualad, and reimagines them as a bunch of teenagers who all attend the same public high school in Metropolis. That said, it is downplayed for Aqualad as he was a founding member of the Teen Titans, Zatanna as she was indeed a teenager starting out until Batman: The Animated Series (and barring Young Justice, every incarnation going forward, including getting Ret-Canon to the comics) made her the same age as Bruce, and Batgirl was herself aged down starting with B: TAS (and like Zatanna's age change, it was imported to the comics).
  • Downplayed with Superman. He's still an adult, but it's mentioned that he only stopped calling himself Superboy "two summers ago", implying that he's in his early 20s at the oldest.
  • In a drastic example, there's Lex Luthor's little sister Lena, who is depicted as a Bratty Half-Pint and significantly younger than the rest of the cast, despite being around the same age as many of them in the comics.
• At the start of The Dragon Prince, primary characters Ezran and Soren are 10 and 19, resspectively. Their novelization counterparts were deaged by a couple of years to 8 and 17.
• DuckTales (2017):
  • In the 1987 series, Webby Vanderquack was clearly a few years younger than the triplets; in this show, she's the same age.
  • In The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck and 1987 series, Flintheart Golmgold was the same age as Scrooge. Here, he was a kid when he met an adult Scrooge.
  • Darkwing Duck villain Negaduck is usually about the same age as the titular character due to being his alternate dimension counterpart. In this series, Jim Starling, the original, in-universe actor that played Darkwing Duck and would become Negaduck, is significantly older than Drake Mallard, the new Darkwing Duck, who's shown to be in his 20s-30s like Launchpad in this series.
  • Completely averted in regards to Scrooge himself. This version of Scrooge hails from the same era of history as his original counterparts, putting him at 150 years old by the start of the series.
  • On the subject of Scrooge, his younger sisters have had their birth order swapped, with Matilda being referred to as the youngest instead of Hortense.
  • Minima De Spell from the comics was the same age as Webby (and thus younger than the triplets). Lena is older than all four of them and a teenager.
  • While still a young Triceratops, Tootsie is older than her original counterpart judging by her larger size.
• G.I. Joe: Renegades sees Dr. Mindbender portrayed as one of the youngest members of Cobra, as opposed to middle-aged like other versions.
• In Hit-Monkey, Yuki is described as a legendary protector of Japan who has existed since ancient times, while her comic counterpart was merely an adult woman in the present day with no sign of being any older.
• In the original Inspector Gadget cartoon, Gadget's niece Penny was a preteen. The 2015 cartoon made her a teenager.
• Iron Man: Armored Adventures:
  • Like X-Men: Evolution, the show is a High School AU that reimagines Tony Stark, James Rhodes and Pepper Potts as teenagers. Other Marvel heroes like Black Panther, Hawkeye and Black Widow show up as the series progresses, and, like the main trio, they're usually either teens or young adults.
  • Jean Grey is a high school student like she originally was in the Silver Age, but is presumably the same age as Tony, Rhodey and Pepper since she briefly attends school with them. In the comics, Tony and the other Avengers are much older than the founding X-Men, who were only teens when the Avengers first debuted.
  • Several villains are also made younger, like the Mandarin, Madame Masque and the Mad Thinker (who all attend the same school as Tony), as well as Justin Hammer/Titanium Man when he shows up in the second season.
• Jackie Chan Adventures: The fictional Jackie Chan is at least a decade younger than his real life counterpart, taking into account he was Jade's age in 1976. The real Jackie Chan, born in 1954, was 22 years old in 1976.
• Jellystone!: Lippy the Lion and Hardy Har-Har are depicted as senior citizens, while Jonny Quest and Hadji graduated from child adventurers to being depicted as adults. On the flip side, Ruff and Reddy are both children. (And robots.)
• The Legend of Vox Machina: In the original stream, Percy and Cassandra de Rolo were the second youngest and youngest of the de Rolo family respectively, with their siblings Julius, Vesper and Oliver all being older. In the show, Vesper and Oliver are shown to have been around preschool-age during the coup that ended their lives while Percy and Cassandra were in their teens, making Percy the second oldest and Cassandra the middle child.
• Les Sisters: In the comics, Maureen was 6 and Wendy was 12. In the animated series, they're both aged up a year, making them 7 and 13, respectively.
• The Marvel Rising animated continuity has the heroes who are part of the titular team and who weren't already teenagers in the usual Marvel continuity aged down into such, such as college-aged superheroines Spider-Gwen (Ghost Spider) and Squirrel Girl.
• Marvel's Spider-Man:
  • Played with in regards to Miles Morales and Anya Corazón, who are teenagers in the comics, but were much younger than Peter, who by that point was in his mid-20s. The cartoon has them all attending high school together.
  • Like many adaptations, Peter already knows Mary Jane Watson, Gwen Stacy, and Harry Osborn.
  • This extends to some of the young heroes Spider-Man teams up with. Kamala Khan, Ironheart and Amadeus Cho are depicted around Peter's age, even though in the comics, he was already a grown adult when they first debuted, with them being closer in age to the aforementioned Miles and Anya.
  • Conversely, Doctor Octopus, Alistair Smythe, the Shocker, Lady Octopus, the Rhino, John Jameson, and the Francine Frye Electro are reimagined by Teen Geniuses. To a lesser extent, the Vulture is now a middle-aged man like in Spider-Man: Homecoming, as opposed to an elderly man.
  • The Sandman's daughter, Keemia, is a little girl in the comics. In the show, she's a teenager.
  • Combined with Doc Ock's aforementioned Age Lift, but the show's version of Superior Spider Man was caused by a 20-year-old Otto Octavius swapping bodies with a 16-year old Peter Parker, not an Octavius nearing 60 with a Peter who's nearing 30.
• Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur:
  • Lunella is 13 rather than 9. In fact, a major plot point in one episode revolves around her helping plan a classmate's bat mitzvah.
  • Aftershock is a teenager in the Spider-Girl comics, but here she's able to successfully pose as a science teacher at Lunella's school, indicating she's at least in her early 20s.
• Muppet Babies (2018):
  • In the original 1984 version of the show, Animal was very clearly the youngest of the group. In the 2018 version, he's around the same age as the rest of the group. In addition, the 2018 versions of the Muppet Babies seem to be slightly older than their 1984 counterparts.
  • Another example is Kermit's nephew, Robin. In the 1984 series, Robin was a tadpole and was mostly confined to swimming in a fishbowl. In the 2018 series, he's a polliwog, having sprouted legs but still retaining his tail.
• My Adventures with Superman:
  • In most iterations, both Clark Kent/Superman and Lois Lane are depicted as being in their late 20s/early 30s. In this series, they've been aged down to their early 20s (with "Kiss Kiss Fall in Portal" confirming Lois to be 23 years old).
  • Jimmy Olsen of the comics is a few years younger than Clark and Lois, usually being depicted as being in his late teens or early 20s while the latter two are in their late 20s. In this show, he's around the same age as the other two.
  • Deathstroke in the comics is depicted as being somewhere in his 50s, while the Slade depicted in this show appears to be no older than his early 30s.
• While My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, and the franchise as a whole, leans toward keeping the characters' ages vague, some characters had a clear age change from generation to generation.
  • Rarity is an unambiguous case of this; her counterpart in G3 was a child, which differs from the toyline where she was an adult pony. FiM Rarity is an adult who is presumably in her 20s.
  • G1 Spike was a baby dragon, although more mature (and possibly older) than the baby ponies. G4 Spike was hatched by Twilight Sparkle and is hinted to be roughly the same age as the Cutie Mark Crusaders, possibly a little older. At any rate, he's still regarded as a baby dragon In-Universe and is clearly younger than the Mane Six. His G3 counterpart, on the other hand, was more than a thousand years old.
• In the 1983 Rainbow Brite, Krys was a child Brian's age, but in the 2014 miniseries, he's Brian's father.
• Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles shakes up the ages of the four Turtles. Rather than all being 15, it's only Raph who's 15. Leo (who's usually the oldest brother in most incarnations) and Donnie are 14 and Mikey is 13. Like the 2012 series, it also makes April a teenager (albeit still older than the turtles at 16).
  • More amusingly, Baxter Stockman, traditionally an adult, is here a young boy.
  • The Big Damn Movie also introduces Casey Jones as being a resident of the Bad Future. In most other adaptations of the TMNT mythos, he lives in the same contemporary time frame as the Turtles.
• Rugrats (2021): Tommy, Chuckie, Phil, Lil and Angelica are the same age as they were in the original Rugrats (Tommy, Phil and Lil are one, Chuckie is two and Angelica is three), but Susie is now two instead of three — making her a subordinate to Angelica rather than an equal, and she's no longer being able to communicate with the adults — and Kimi is three instead of one, making her a preschool classmate of Angelica and older than Chuckie — who's not her stepbrother in this incarnation (at least not yet) — instead of younger.
• A variation with Aisling in The Secret of Kells. The character is based on a genre of Irish poetry where a spirit representing Ireland itself appears, taking the form of an older woman. However instead of a wise older woman, Aisling is a mischievous little girl.
• She-Ra and the Princesses of Power ages down a lot of the main cast (20s-30s in the original, teens in the reboot). Subverted with Entrapta, who looks to be a teen, but is actually (according to Word of Saint Paul), an adult in her late 20s or early 30s. Frosta is especially young compared to her previous design, now an 11 (and three-quarters) year old.
• Comic-Book Time caused The Simpsons to do this over multiple seasons in the 90s. Homer and Marge were first established as being in their early 30s (35 and 34 in Seasons 1–3), and accordingly Season 2's "The Way We Was" depicted their first meeting, as high school seniors, taking place in 1974. By Season 8, this date meant that Homer and Marge would be in their late 30s and their ages accordingly got a Retcon to 38 and 37, respectively, while their three children remained 10, 8, and 1 or under. These days the writers tend to default to a Vague Age for both.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • In Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, Tails was 4½, whereas his game counterpart is 8.
  • In Sonic the Hedgehog (SatAM), Tails was 10 years old, whereas his game counterpart is 8.
• In the comics, Morbius was a full-grown adult with a doctorate before he became a vampire. In Spider-Man: The Animated Series, he's a college student.
• Spidey and His Amazing Friends: As a series based on Marvel comics but aimed for pre-schoolers as target audience, most of the characters are much younger than in the comics - for example, the series main heroes, Spidey, Spin and Ghost Spider are reimaged as children rather than already being teenagers when they got their powers.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012) re-imagined April O’Neil (who has always been a young adult in her late 20s) into a teenager. This applies to Casey Jones as well when he's introduced in the second season. This seems to have largely been done to have them in the same age group as the Turtles (while averting Artifact Title), which among other things makes their closeness slightly less unusual^note which is to say, more "realistic" and (perhaps more prudently) the Ship Tease with Donatello and April more palatable.
• Many, if not most, of the Teen Titans (2003) were young adults (mostly in their late teens to early 20s) during The New Teen Titans run, but are ambiguously between 13, 17 and 16 to 20s depending on the character, in the cartoon.
  • Spin-Off Teen Titans Go! ages up Rose Wilson to be slightly older than the Titans. Her comics counterpart was a teenager when most of the New Teen Titans were well into adulthood.
• Cheetara and Tygra — adults in Thundercats 1985 — are aged down to teenagers in ThunderCats (2011). Lion-O is perhaps the only character in history who's been aged down and aged up at the same time in the same work. In the original, due to a Cryonics Failure while being a Human Popsicle, he was a fully grown adult with the mind of a child. In the reboot, he's (physically) aged down and (mentally) aged up to a teenager.
• Tuffy the Mouse from the Tom and Jerry comics was the same age as Jerry. When he was brought into the cartoon, they changed his name to "Nibbles" and made him a baby.
• Transformers: Rescue Bots made Cody Burns a child, when his counterpart in the storybooks and original version of the toyline that predated the animated series depicted him as a young adult.
• Ultimate Spider-Man (2012) does with Luke Cage, Iron Fist, Rhino, Ka-Zar, Vulture, and Triton, making them all Spidey's age rather than older. It also follows the Ultimate comics example of putting Mary Jane Watson and Harry Osborn in high school with Peter, too. Aunt May is also noticeably younger looking and more athletic than her mainline comics counterpart.
  • Similarly, the age of Amadeus Cho has been dropped a few years to thirteen, and he actually attends the same school as Peter and the other young heroes due to having skipped a few grades.
• In Voltron, Pidge was a young boy. In the Continuity Reboot, Voltron: Legendary Defender, she's now fifteen.
  • It's a little more vague with the ages of the other members of the Voltron Force, though they were generally considered adults. The Paladins of Legendary Defender on the other hand are mostly teenagers, except for Shiro.
  • Somewhat downplayed with Coran and Allura. Here, they're ten thousand years old due to being frozen in cryogenic sleep for millennia, but are still biologically a teenage girl and a middle-aged man.
• Voodoo was an adult in Wild C.A.T.s (WildStorm), but a teenager in Wild C.A.T.s (1994).
• X-Men: Evolution:
  • The show turns Cyclops, Jean Grey, Nightcrawler, and Rogue into teenagers, but keeps Wolverine, Storm and Beast as adults so that they're old enough to act as mentors to the young mutants at the Xavier Institute. It's a downplayed case for the first two since they were teens in the earliest comics, but especially notable for Beast, who was part of the original X-Men alongside Jean and Cyclops in the comics. This also makes Cyclops and the others around the same age as Jubilee, Boom-Boom, Sunspot and the rest of the New Mutants, who were significantly younger than the previous teams of X-Men in the comics (having debuted when most of the X-Men were already adults).
  • Consequently, Kitty Pryde is aged up slightly in order to fit in with the rest of the team. When she first appeared in the comics, she was only 13, and was very much The Baby of the Bunch. In Evolution, Kitty's powers don't start awakening until she's already in high school, making her roughly the same age as the rest of the teen X-Men.
  • Forge is depicted as a Teen Genius who got stuck in a Pocket Dimension back during The '70s, making him physically younger than his comic counterpart (an adult man) while still technically having him be much older than his X-Men teammates from the comics.
  • Many of the Brotherhood members are made into teenagers too, like Avalanche, Toad and the Blob.
  • Destiny is also significantly younger than in the comics, looking like she's in her 40s at the most, whereas the comic version of the character is old enough to have been alive during the 19th century (and, unlike many long-lived X-Men characters, looks it). In fact, it was frequently implied, and later explicitly confirmed in Immortal X-Men, that Destiny, whose real name is "Irene Adler", was the Irene Adler from Sherlock Holmes (and that Holmes "himself" was really Mystique).
  • The most extreme case in this show is Multiple Man, one of the New Mutants. He was introduced as an adult in the comics, but in the cartoon he is a prepubescent boy and by far the youngest student at the Institute. However, making him a child is actually a nod to his backstory in the comics, as he is one of the rare mutants whose powers manifested at birth (the doctor slapped his behind and was suddenly holding two babies).
• Young Justice (2010):
  • In the original Teen Titans comics, Robin was about the same age as the rest of his teammates. He's 13 in Season 1 of the TV show, making him the youngest member of the team except for Superboy, who is only months old but was rapidly aged so that he has the body of a 16-year-old.
  • Cyborg is introduced as a teenager in the third season, making him younger than characters like Nightwing, Donna Troy and Wally West, who were his contemporaries in the comics.
  • Red Tornado is in his 60s, having been a member of the Justice Society of America back during the late 1940s. In the original comics, he was built in the present day by T.O. Morrow.
  • Variant with Kent Nelson, a.k.a. Doctor Fate. Both the comic and animated version of the character have been around since the 1940s, but the comic Kent was kept magically young, and thus didn't look anywhere close to his chronological age until the Zero Hour: Crisis in Time! crisis. This version of Kent lacked the supernatural youth of his comic counterpart, and thus had the body of an old man.
  • In general, the Classic Titans and the comic-Young Justice/Modern Titans characters are all roughly contemporaries, when there's about ten years between them in the comics.
  • Zatanna is the same age as the team, while in the comics she's part of their mentors' generation. The creators were actually surprised when DC gave them a list of characters who premiered as teenagers and saw her on it.
• Young Robin Hood reimagined Robin and his band, and Prince John, as teenagers.
• Zorro: The Chronicles: Inverted, as had been done with the earlier Kaiketsu Zorro and Zorro: Generation Z; here Diego and Bernardo are both in their teens, whereas most adaptations have them as grown men at the time Diego starts out as Zorro.

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