Comic Book Time / Western Animation

• Spinoff Babies shows like Muppet Babies, A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, Tom & Jerry Kids, Yo Yogi!, and Baby Looney Tunes are presented as Broad Strokes prequels to the original shows, yet the stories are set in a present time period that is in the future relative to the original shows, placing the childhood of younger versions of characters further ahead in time than the adventures of their adult selves. Either time doesn't matter, or these are Alternate Continuity and Negative Continuity shows.
• Averted in Adventure Time: Finn aged more or less in real-time: he began the show as a 12 year-old boy, and is 13 by the next season. Finn was 17 as the show entered its eighth and final year, and considering there are just over 220 episodes between Finn's 13th and 17th birthdays, it's perfectly reasonable that only four years had passed. His aging continues to progress in the Sequel Series, with Distant Lands (one episode of which is set ten years after the series finale) featuring a 27 year old Finn and Fionna And Cake (set another two later years after that) featuring a 29 year old Finn, all adding up to Finn being more or less the same age as his voice actor for most of the series' run and actually getting a little older than him by about three years.
• The Amazing World of Gumball: In eight years of air time, there were in-show events said to be years apart^LikeMolly's absence in the second season was said to have lasted a year. A title card in the fifth season episode "The Loophole" states the third season episode "The Spoiler" took place a year earlier., several characters have had birthdays, Christmas has come at least twice, Halloween three times, and dates always lists episodes as taking place in the year they're written ^note Season 1 takes place in 2010, Season 3 takes place in 2014, Season 4 takes place in 2015, and Seasons 5 and 6 take place in 2017. Despite this, there never signs of anyone getting older—except possibly Gumball's class graduating from 7th grade to 8th by the fifth season, but even that could just be a mistake. This becomes a plot point in "The Kids", as Gumball's and Darwin's voices are cracking due to their aging voice actors, yet they don't seem to be aging in-universe. The end of the episode, and several others, imply the universe itself is not allowing time to pass.
• ALVINNN!!! and the Chipmunks: In "Family Spirit", Dave states he met The Chipmunks about seven years ago, relative to March 1st, 2015 (French airdate) or August 6, 2015 (US airdate), making The Chipmunks retroactively not exist during the times of the songs they have been covering. Or, this is an Alternate Continuity reboot.
• On American Dad!, Steve will always be 14 and Hayley always 18 or 19, but the episode "Tears of a Clooney" alone takes place over the course of an entire year, with little room left in its chain of events for other events to occur. Though, since each of the Christmas episodes has involved time/reality manipulation of some sort, the Timey-Wimey Ball may be playing a role.
  • Lampshaded in the Season 16 episode "Stan & Francine & Connie & Ted", where Barry starts explaining the plot of the Season 2 episode "With Friends With Steve", and starts with "As you may remember, a few months, but what seems like years ago..."
• Arthur: Sans the Series Finale Time Skip:
  • The series featured the terms of an anthropomorphic animal Bill Clinton and George W. Bush alike, yet Arthur and his friends are still in the third grade.
  • Similarly, technology has lurched forward with no comment from other characters: The earliest seasons made a joke about Muffy owning a cellphone, while a later episode had another character getting too attached to her new cell phone and even later episodes have characters owning smartphones like they're nothing.
  • D.W. also turned five and baby Kate was born and aged to around nine months to about a year, yet Arthur is still eight. Kate had since shown signs of entering toddlerhood but it's unlikely Arthur will move up a grade as that'd remove Ratburn as a character and change the class structure. Eventually they did graduate in Season 19 and Mr. Ratburn would move up to Grade 4 with them... only to remain in the third grade for Seasons 20 and 21.
• Played with in Beavis And Butthead:
  • The original series run only lasted four years, so the boys not aging was less noticable.
  • The 2011 revival was presumably set in that year with the boys watching Twilight and Barack Obama being president. Though Word of God said they'd thought about focusing on Beavis and Butthead as adults in this series.
  • The Beavis And Butthead Do The Universe movie actually uses Time Travel to explain how the guys got from 1998 to 2022.
  • The follow up season continues the movie with the pair living in the 2020s but some episodes focus on "Old Beavis" and "Old Butthead" in an Alternate Universe where they never travelled through time.
• In Bob's Burgers, Tina turned 13 in the first season (2011) and has stayed there since, Gene has always been 11, and Louise has always been 9. There might not be a ton of contemporary references, but it's apparent that time hasn't just stood still otherwise.
• The Boondocks has a lot of contemporary references however the brothers are eight years old and ten years old. This creates a situation where Huey was ten when Obama became president however in episodes set years later he is still ten; either he should have aged or he would have been very young during that presidential election. Lampshaded in one episode where an elderly man is friends with Huey and explains to Robert and Riley that he and Huey "go way back."
• While Bugs Bunny celebrated his 50th birthday according to the TV special Happy Birthday Bugs: 50 Looney Years and the NES game The Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout, there has been no mention of a 75th birthday party. Averted when he celebrated his 80th birthday in Looney Tunes Cartoons.
• This is averted in the DC Animated Universe; however, the indicators of how much time has passed are more abstract and can be easy to miss (other than the fact that Batman Beyond obviously takes place 40+ years in the future). The New Batman Adventures have a notable Time Skip following Batman: The Animated Series, while Superman: The Animated Series has a more clear continuity of events. Supergirl is probably the best indicator: she's 16 in the third season of STAS and it's mentioned to be her 21st birthday during her final appearance in Justice League Unlimited. While an exact timeline is impossible to pin down, it can be said that the 14 years that span the DCAU is not far off from the modern timespan of the setting.
• Dexter's Laboratory began in 1996, and finished airing in 2003, but he has remained eight years old for the show's entire 7-year run. The only exceptions to this are when he's had a Plot-Relevant Age-Up explained away by Phlebotinum. This also applies to the Ambiguously Human characters The Justice Friends as well.
• The Fairly OddParents!:
  • Timmy Turner has remained ten for over ten years. It was assumed that he had turned eleven in one episode, "Birthday Bashed", but a later episode, "Manic-Mom Day", established that he's still ten years old.
  • He even celebrates two birthdays over the course of the show, and did celebrate the fact that he'd held onto Cosmo and Wanda for a year in the third season. The Comic-Book Time part was confirmed early on, because Timmy traveled back thirty years in two different episodes: to 1970 in the first season, but to 1972 in the third.
  • On that note, when "The Secret Origin of Denzel Crocker!" was created Timmy's birthday was dated as 1992. That should have been booted out of the continuity early on, making the episode non-canon, as Timmy never reaches an other age and there's no indication the show is perpetually set in 2002. However, "Timmy's Secret Wish" makes it ever the more possible Timmy still is born in 1992, possibly averting the typical floating timeline. This makes the live action movies set earlier than people think. You'd think it's set in the 2020s when it could be set in the early to mid 2010s, which is still 20 Minutes into the Future but less so.
  • This is given quite a twist in the "Timmy's Secret Wish" special: Timmy once wished that everyone in the world would stop aging (and that Cosmo, the fairy granting the wish, would forget granting it afterwards). It turns out, by the time this is discovered, it's been 50 years! And apparently nobody in the entire world noticed.
  • In the movie Abra-Catastrophe!, Timmy celebrates his Fairy-versery for keeping his fairies a secret for a year, but he's still 10 — however, it was established that he got Cosmo and Wanda as his fairies when he was 8, a short while before he turned 10.
• Usually played straight and frequently lampshaded in Family Guy:
  • In "Blind Ambition", Peter mentions that Bonnie has been pregnant for "like six years", and tells her to either have the baby or not. Stewie's age has been lampshaded a few times, notably in "Road to Rubert" when he reacts to Brian telling him it's about time for him to grow up and let go of his stuffed toy Rupert, "Brian, I'm one!", and Brian replies "Still?" In "Oceans Three and a Half", Bonnie finally gave birth to a girl named Susie after almost ten years of pregnancy. Fourteen years have passed since then, and Susie is still a baby.
  • On the other hand, one character, Bertram, has managed to be conceived, carried to term, born, and age enough to be allowed to play on the playground while Stewie remained one year old, all in one episode. Other episodes have also distinctly taken place over months of time with no change in Stewie's age. A good example of this was the episodes "The Perfect Castaway" in which there is a time lapse of a year, but Stewie (among practically all the cast) remaining the same.
  • Family Guy occasionally gives the main characters actual progression. There's the episode where Chris finally went to high school, several episodes regarding Meg's gradual aging (she was 15 at the beginning of season 1, and aged to 16 in a later episode of the same season, started another episode in a later season with her 17th birthday, and eventually aged to 18 by season 10), and another episode beginning with Lois' 41st birthday. However, it looks strange that Meg has aged somewhat normally while Chris only aged one year throughout the whole series.
  • Brian is always stated to be 7 or 8 years old in dog years and he is always mulling over about just how old he is getting, even though Brian never seems to get older at all. Lampshaded when Stewie asks Brian:
    Stewie: How can you have a teenage son when you yourself are only seven?
    Brian: Well those are dog years.
    Stewie: That doesn't make any sense!
    Brian: You know what Stewie, if you don't like it, just go on the Internet and complain.
  • Once again lampshaded in "Christmas Guy", the show's third Christmas special. Lois proudly announces that it's Stewie's first Christmas, to which Stewie replies, "Again?"
• The Flintstones zig-zag this a little. The four principals never changed in appearance (apart from the usual art evolution such series goes through) through the birth of Pebbles and the adoption of Bamm-Bamm during the original six seasons and the movie (The Man Called Flintstone). They still don't in The Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm Show (1971) where the two infants are now teens and even those two don't change in the subsequent NBC shows later on (The Flintstone Comedy Show, Flintstone Funnies). Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm eventually graduate to adulthood in the 90s with three made-for-TV animated films (I Yabba Dabba Do!, Hollyrock-A-Bye Baby, A Flintstone Family Christmas) while their parents, on the verge of grandparenthood, still look the way they did when the original series aired its finale in 1966. The 2001 Cartoon Network special Flintstones: On The Rocks retcons this, designing the four main characters as they looked from the original series' very start.
• The Animated Adaptation of Franklin as well as its spin-off Franklin and Friends have used a very odd version in which Franklin and his friends don't really age at all throughout most of the original series. In the film Back to School with Franklin, they move up a grade. In Franklin and Friends, they're said to be about a year older, but still attend class with the same teacher. Bear's baby sister Beatrice is born in the first season of the original show, Franklin's sister Harriet is born in the film Franklin and the Green Knight, set between the fourth and fifth seasons. By the fourth season of the original series, Beatrice is toddler-aged. In the fifth season, Harriet is as well, and by Back to School with Franklin, Beatrice is attending preschool and Harriet is near that point. In Franklin and Friends, both seem to be about the same age they were at the end of the original television series.
• Futurama explicitly states the year pretty frequently, showing that episodes are mostly set about 1000 years after they air (the last episode of the initial run was in 2003, the continuation movies were in 2007 and explicitly said they were set in 3007). The span of time from Fry arriving in the future to beginning of "Meanwhile" is about 14 years. While there is an evolving Status Quo and Character Development, this presents a few problems:
  • Outside of a few time travel episodes that show the characters through decades of their lives, Dwight and Cubert are stated to be about 12 years old in Season 3 and remain so through the show's run. By the end, they should be in their mid-20s, which is about as old and Fry and Leela were when the show started. Fry and Leela don't visibly age despite going from their mid-20s to around 40 by the last season, Hermes should be in his 50s or 60s by the end. However, Professor Farnsworth started the series in his 130's, so the perception of aging in the future is likely different.
  • Amy is introduced as an intern and doctoral candidate college student in the first season. The writers realized they completely forgot about that as the show progressed and she finally graduates in Season 6, where it's stated that she's been an intern at Planet Express for 10 years.
• Hey Arnold! originally began in 1996 and finished production in 2001 (though new episodes continued to air sporadically until 2004). In 2017, a Big Damn Movie was produced to finally wrap up the series; it takes place about a year after the series^note in the show they were fourth graders, while this is apparently the summer after their fifth grade, but with the setting switched to be closer to 2017, most notably with the characters having modern cell phones, though the fashion is still 1990s and Arnold keeps his signature walkman. The trope is lampshaded multiple times, since Helga's father owns a beeper store which is now going out of business.
• The main characters of Home Movies stayed eight-years-old throughout its four year run.
• King of the Hill has an interesting timeline. At the beginning of the series, Bobby was 11 years old and had a birthday. He turned 13 in the fifth season and hasn't really aged since. Even more odd is that his sudden lack of aging allowed for Joseph and several other characters from school to catch up and even surpass him in hitting puberty; the closest to an explanation this has received is claiming that Bobby is a late bloomer. In the fourth season, Luanne stated that she was 19½, then in Season 9, she celebrated her 21st birthday. John Redcorn was said to be 36 in a Season 3 episode and 40 in a Season 10 episode. One of the writers later posted on Facebook that an unused ending for "Lucky's Wedding Suit", which was the intended series finale before another two seasons were ordered, would have involved the main four recapping several events in the series, revealing that the entire series took place over a single year, despite them having celebrated several holidays, particularly Thanksgiving, multiple times over.
• Liberty's Kids: The show covered 1773 right up to about 1789, and the main characters never aged — although all the adults around them did! By the end of the series Sarah was still 15, James 14, and Henri only 8 — after about 16 years! This leads to weird scenes where they recall events that happened — events in which they participated — eight, ten, twelve years ago, and marvel at how much things have changed in the meantime...
• While Lilo & Stitch: The Series is vague enough about how much time pass in the series, Their crossover with Recess offers an unusual example due to both shows being originally set in two different periods, While the former is set in the early 2000s, The latter is firmly said to take place in the 1997–1998 school year as detailed below. TJ and his friends should logically be visiting Hawai'i as high schoolers and not as fourth-graders.
• Time in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic is vague (made vaguer by the fact most of the main characters are adults). Season 4 implies that only one year has passed since Season 1. As of Season 8, the series has had five different Hearth's Warming episodes despite it being a yearly holiday. Spike and the Cutie Mark Crusaders have aged but only slightly. At minimum, only a few years at most seem to have passed despite the fact the series is over seven years old by season 8. It doesn't help that the first season makes it explicit that episodes aren't in any particular order; the last day of fall is two episodes after the last day of winter.
• Averted in Pepper Ann, which did pretty much the exact same thing as Recess below: started in 1997, continued past 2000, in-series calendars still say '97. Like Recess, this is also played straight due to the show having 113 episode segments, many of which span several days — meaning there is no way all these episodes could have happened in one year in real life.
• Phineas and Ferb:
  • The theme song mentions "104 days of summer vacation"...but the show ended with well over 200 episodes, including specials. A few clues are offered about dates — the first season episode "Dude, We're Getting the Band Back Together" takes place on June 15, the season two episode "Summer Belongs to You" takes place on the summer solstice, and the series finale "The Last Day of Summer" takes place on the last day of summer vacation. The show's sliding timescale has been lampshaded several times:
  • Phineas answers (to a thought we never hear) in an episode: "You're right Ferb. It DOES feel longer than 104 days."
  • Buford at one point says "Are you sure it's only been three months? Because I added up the stuff we've been building and we're way over 150..."
  • In "Fly on the Wall," Doof laments that the summer seems to be going on forever, as if it had gone on for... four years. (This episode premiered in 2011, which is indeed four years since the show started.)
  • In "Road to Danville" and "Mind Share", Buford and Candace, respectively, off-handedly comment on the longevity of the summer.
• The Powerpuff Girls, having been first devised in 1992 as Craig McCracken's school project as The Whoopass Girls, were first depicted as five-year-old children attending kindergarten in their first Hanna-Barbera commissioned short "Meat Fuzzy Lumkins." They remained five years old through all six seasons of their show (plus specials and the movie) in spite of the fact they celebrated a birthday in the episode "Birthday Bash." A few early episodes of have the series taking place in 2000 according to some scenes, and it shows in their technology (such as several characters owning a Nintendo 64). By the special Dance Pantsed (which was released after the cartoon ended) the series takes place somewhere in the early 2010s as seen by the characters owning a Wii. The Continuity Reboot The Powerpuff Girls (2016) is a Stealth Sequel and takes place in the mid-2010s (but Princess just turns six in one episode).
• Ready Jet Go!: One year has passed In-Universe, but the characters (save for Mindy and Carrot) never get any older. There have been two Halloween episodes, one Christmas episode, an episode referencing said Christmas episode as being "last year," and Mindy and Carrot both had birthdays. Besides them, none of the characters age. Making things more confusing, "One Small Step" takes place on the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, meaning it took place in July 2019. For reference, the show started in 2016.
• Reboot:
  • The series subverts and justifies this. Everyone in Mainframe doesn't age much, but when Enzo becomes a game sprite, he comes back an older, grizzled self, along with his girlfriend, both having started as children. Then when they make it back to Mainframe, Enzo is visibly as old as his sister Dot who had always been much older than him. However, the faster rate of time in the Games is supposed to justify this. It is worth noting that everyone is a program of some form and, as Enzo and AndrAIa show, age depends upon how much processing power is dedicated to them (games being CPU-intensive).
  • Things are also fudged a bit by the characters perceiving time much slower than in the real world, thanks to the high processor speed of the computer they're in. They regularly talk about nanoseconds the way we do hours.
• Recess:
  • A notable aversion. While the show began in 1997 and ended in 2001 (and two Direct to Video films in 2003), it's been established that the show only takes place over the course of the September 1997 - June 1998 school year. This is firmly established in Recess: School's Out, where the villain talks about how he was holding revenge for thirty years since 1968 (the movie was released in February 2001, but takes place in June 1998).
  • Somewhat played straight, however, in the sense that the maximum number of school days in the US is 180, yet the original series is made up of 128 episode segments, many of which take place within more than one day. At least one episode, "Recess is Cancelled," takes place within the course of over two weeks.
• Rugrats combined this with Not Allowed to Grow Up. Just from the sheer number of episodes, some of which specifically take place over the course of multiple days, one would think that at least a year would've passed, but it doesn't. Add in the fact that they have holiday specials almost all the way around the calendar, including multiple Valentine's Day episodes, and this gets a bit ridiculous. Then there was that not real-time pregnancy that nevertheless tried to pass itself off as the right amount of time (it was explicitly autumn when the pregnancy was discovered in a season finale, and summer in The Rugrats Movie in which Dil is born (released before the start of the following season), so nine months is to be assumed), yet no time actually passes for anyone else. Lampshaded by the anniversary special called "Decade in Diapers". Then they make up for it by applying all ten years of accumulated time at once. Chuckie seems to be the only one to develop over the course of the series, moving from a crib to a bed (and all the anxiety therein), and in the second movie, says his first word to grown-ups. The second film has Chas trying a dating site, which implies a mid-to-late 1990s setting (which would mean All Grown Up! took place in Next Sunday A.D. when first released). Going by the date the show started the babies should have been born in the late 80s; however, Charlotte herself has shown signs of being a teen in the early to mid 80s in certain episodes.
• Scooby-Doo:
  • Scooby has celebrated his fortieth birthday. He's still alive and the members of Mystery Inc. are still teenagers. Also, their ages are always the same, despite the various series having had more than one Halloween Episode. That Halloween must have been a really busy day for the gang.
  • The continuity that begins with Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island follows on from the original series, but has the teenagers growing into adults... and Scooby not aging at all, despite being a Great Dane — a breed which has an average lifespan of 8-10 years. Similarly, A Pup Named Scooby-Doo has him as a puppy when the others were in elementary school, which is the same problem from the other end. In addition, technology levels and fashion (outside the main characters, at least) are based directly on when the series aired, meaning A Pup Named Scooby-Doo appears to be set after any previous Scooby-Doo series.
  • This was lampshaded in Scooby Doo! Pirates Ahoy! The Gang goes on a cruise to celebrate Fred's birthday. At the wharf, they ask him how old he is. His response? "37. *beat* 38... 39... Here it is. Dock 40."
• The Simpsons is an example of a show lasting long enough for this trope to become apparent numerous times over:
  • The births of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and Maggie, the year of Homer and Marge's first meeting, wedding, etc., all appear to shift as the seasons roll by so that the characters can constantly remain the same age (more or less). This usually manifests itself in the flashback episodes. Grandpa, however will always be a WWII veteran, even if this makes him unrealistically old.
  • One egregious example is Apu and Manjula's octuplets, who they decide to have after seeing Maggie, and were conceived, born, and are now toddlers that have shown to be able to stand and talk, while Maggie is still the same crawling, teething, silent infant. Apu's nephew Jamshed is also shown as a young child in the early seasons, yet returns about twenty seasons later now as a college graduate, with no one else having aged a day.
  • There is an early episode when Bart and Lisa likens watching the premiere of a movie to watching the moon landing. We then see a flashback of a 10-ish year old Homer completely ignoring the moon landing, listening to his records. They later had an episode focused on his mother and her hippie-background and had a toddler Homer showing up at Woodstock. The two events took place only 26 days apart!
  • How many episodes have Bart and Lisa beginning or finishing the school year, but they (along with their classmates) are always stuck in the same grade?
  • In Season 8, Luann Van Houten tells Marge that she just can't keep up with the Go-Go Nineties.
  • The Season 5 opener refers to Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra and Bob Hope all still being alive, working and successful. George Harrison cameos in the same episode (and not just the flashback bit).
  • In Season 3, Sideshow Bob says that "You can't keep the Democrats out of the White House forever!" That was eight presidential terms ago, five of them Democratic, and Maggie hasn't aged a day.
  • Frequently lampshaded in the commentaries by Al Jean, who loves to bring up the fact that one of the show's current writers was born after 1980, and is thus technically younger than Bart.
  • When, exactly, the backstory to the kids' birth takes place has never been treated very seriously (notably in two separate episodes Bart was 5 in 1990, but was born in 1980, making him 5 in 1985) and is always floating at "10, 8 and 1 year(s) ago". This is lampshaded in another episode where Homer remembers his childhood as "The fifties, or the sixties, or... maybe it was the early seventies."
    • This could be part of the reason Homer's mother was written out of the series. She left her family in The '60s to escape the law but at this point, 40ish-year-old Homer would be far too young for this to make any sense now.
  • The amount of Christmas episodes obviously suggests years passing, yet it never does. Doesn't anyone in Springfield realise Christmas only happens once a year? Two major events in the normally Negative Continuity show (Santa's Little Helper getting adopted and Lisa turning Buddhist) happen over two Christmases, and on one occasion Homer counts up at least a dozen family Christmases which he had saved and/or ruined, even though he's only been married to Marge for about 10-11 years.
  • In the episode "Lisa's Wedding", Lisa sees into the distant future her first love in the far-off year of... 2010, 15 years from the episode's 1995 airdate.
  • Lampshaded in "That '90s Show", where Bart claims he's never heard of the '90s. This was rather controversial, seeing as how past episodes depicted Bart interacting with major pop culture figures and trends of the 1990s, yet this storyline required he be born in 1998.
  • Lampshaded in "The Last Temptation of Krust" when Marge is taking Bart and Lisa shoe shopping for dress shoes. Lisa complains that the shoes are two sizes too big and Marge says she'll grow into them. Lisa then asks 'When?' and Marge says 'Oh you're overdue for a growth spurt.'
  • Major League Baseball catcher/later manager Mike Scioscia made guest appearances in 1992 and 2010 and aged normally. Although the events of the 1992 episode were mentioned, his physical appearance was not lampshaded, despite a great opportunity to blame it on his tragic illness in the former episode.
  • The episode "Angry Dad The Movie" has a very strange timeline, it is stated that Bart created Angry Dad in 1999, even though the original episode aired in 2002. Later in the episode Bart claims he became a fan of animation after watching the early episodes of SpongeBob SquarePants as a toddler.
  • "Ned-Liest Catch" references Edna Krabappel's relationship with Aerosmith drummer Joey Kramer which took place in the 3rd season episode "Flaming Moe's" back in 1991. He has aged in real time since then and no one comments on this.
  • Also in "Behind The Laughter", Lisa states in her "tell-all book" that she has been given anti-aging hormones to keep her 8.
  • Presidents George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden have all either been depicted in office, or at least mentioned on the show, and three of them got re-elected. Living former presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan have been mentioned in present tense or depicted interacting with the main cast as well, though all three are now long dead. A teenage Homer is depicted as hating then-current president Nixon, while adult Homer is shown performing for President Reagan during his time with the Bee Sharps. In perhaps the weirdest example, Kearney is at one point shown as remembering Watergate. At the time, this was intended to be a gag about how weirdly old Kearney was to be still in elementary school — maybe in his early 20s or so. By today's standards, he'd have to be in his 50s for this joke to make any sense!
  • In the first half-hour episode where the family gets Santa's Little Helper, Marge writes in a letter to her family that Maggie had taken her first steps, though she still fell down every so often. Maggie's been learning how to walk for more than thirty years.
  • Lampshaded by Sideshow Bob in the "Treehouse of Horror XXVI" segment "Wanted: Dead, then Alive": "24 years of trying to kill a ten-year-old child [Bart] have finally paid off."
  • Early episodes of the series characterized Principal Seymour as a Vietnam war veteran who has flashback about his tour of duty, with one episode ("I Love Lisa") showing him still tormented by the death of a combat buddy. This aspect of Skinner's backstory gets downplayed as the series went on. As of 2013, The New York Times was estimating the average age of a Vietnam survivor to be 75. [1]
  • The flashback episodes are particularly bad with this one. Homer and Marge met in the late 70s, conceived Bart in 1980, got married shortly after, with Lisa being born shortly before the 1984 Olympics.
  • Likewise, a Season 7 episode shows Grandpa Simpson being older than Mr. Burns during World War II by at least a decade. Another flashback, in Season 8's "Burns Baby Burns" states that Mr. Burns attended his twenty-fifth Yale reunion around the time Gone With The Wind came out in cinemas, suggesting he was born no later than about 1893.
  • Another flash-forward episode features a fun lampshade hanging, where we meet the future versions of the rest of the family, but it seems Maggie is still a baby. Then it turns out this is actually Maggie Junior.
  • Another flashback episode pokes fun at this, with Marge setting up a flashback to six years ago with "The president back then was the president, the popular music of those times were all the rage..."
  • The 2017 Treehouse of Horror comic contains a parody of It. Notably, Krusty the Clown scares child versions of Carl and Lenny with the cancellation of ALF, despite both of those characters being introduced as middle-aged men the same year the show was actually cancelled in real life.
  • Season 8's "Hurricane Neddy" shows that Ned was (allegedly) raised by beatniks thirty years prior; the episode first aired in 1996, putting his childhood anywhere from the late fifties into the sixties. In 1999, "Viva Ned Flanders" reveals that Ned is sixty years old, meaning his birth year is also in the late thirties long before his parents would've had him.
  • The "Treehouse of Horror XXXIV" segment "Ei8ht" notably averts this, taking place in an Alternate Continuity in which Sideshow Bob successfully murdered Bart in the season 5 episode "Cape Feare" in 1993, then flash-forwards to 2023, showing Lisa and the Springfield Elementary School children having since grown up in real time.
• South Park:
  • The characters don't age much. Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny started out as 8-year-old boys in the third grade. In the 4th season, the boys move onto fourth grade and were 9-years old. By the season 15 episode "Crack Baby Athletic Association", all the boys were 10. None of the other characters in the series have aged at all either with the exception of Ike who started out as a toddler who could barely speak coherently; as of season eleven he is a bit taller, wears different clothes and he can now speak in full sentences. In the Facebook episode, "You have 0 Friends," first broadcast in spring of 2010, several of the boys' Facebook profiles were shown, listing their birth years as 2001 — four years after the show started airing (in fact Ike's gravestone in an early episode had him born in 1996).
  • Speaking of the boys entering 4th grade in Season 4, they are still there. Assuming the entire class wasn't held back (and even then it would have to be multiple times), that would mean that (among many other things) the 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020 elections (all of which had episodes about them) all took place in a single school year.
  • An incredably jarring subversion happens in Season 21 with the reamergance of Terrance and Phillip. Despite everyone else being more or less the same age as they were when the boys watched them back in season one, Season 21 shows Terrance and Phillip in their 60s or even older as if they have been aging in real time all this time (hell, even faster—they couldn't have been more than 30 during the film, and two decades later they appear to be pushing 70). The duo even lampshade this as they are suprised to have lived long to see Kyle start the same outrage his mother started way back in the movie.
• The Spectacular Spider-Man averts this—we open the night before Peter begins his junior year and season two ends in the spring, with episodes set around all the major holidays between. It was intended to be a 65-Episode Cartoon that would end with Peter and his classmates Graduating from the Story, but it was Screwed by the Lawyers before that could happen.
• Total Drama:
  • The original cast have all been about 16 since the show first aired in 2007. The first two seasons attempted to avert this trope by casually mentioning it's only been a few days between seasons, but by the fifth season, they've taken to just dancing around ever stating the ages of the characters.
  • Word of God says that Noah, Geoff and Owen, who were 16 in Season 1, are 19 by the events of Ridonculous Race, a Spin-Off which is sometimes billed as the "seventh season."
  • The revival is mentioned to be 15 years after the original, yet Owen, who should logically be in his early thirties, appears in the second season of the revival looking no older than before.
• Although a preschoolers' show, Twirlywoos has its avian protagonists not growing up in any way with the kids Not Allowed to Grow Up.
• Over fifteen years after The Venture Bros. premiered, only two years have passed in-series, while pop culture and mundane technology have kept pace with real life.
• Notably averted in Young Justice (2010) (considering Comic-Book Time is a building block of its source material, The DCU). There's a timestamp at least Once per Episode establishing the date and time when events begin. Word of God says that the Universe Bible has a timeline that's 149 pages long, giving all the major events in the show's history. The show begins on July 4, 2010 (which was originally Next Sunday A.D.) and the first season finale was set on New Year's. Characters grow, age, and even bear children naturally.

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