Dub Induced Plot Hole / Western Animation

• The Italian dub of Adventure Time skips four plot-heavy episodes from the sixth seasons ("Wake Up", "Escape from the Citadel", "The Tower". and "Breezy"), leaving many confusing plot-holes as a result (mainly how Finn lost the Grass Sword and his right arm, the entire existence of Sweet P, the many mentions of Martin Mertens and Finn's new grass arm). As of now, the episodes still haven't been dubbed.
• In the Dutch dub of the All Grown Up! episode Saving Cynthia, Angelica is mentioned to have gotten her Cynthia doll at age 5. However, this does not line up with the events in Rugrats, where Angelica is clearly shown as already having the doll at age 3. To add insult to injury, this was a translation of a line, that, in the original English version, implies Angelica stopped playing with Cynthia at age 5, clearly showing the Dutch dubbers missed the mark.
• The Amazing World of Gumball:
  • The Season 3 episode "The Kids" is all about Gumball and Darwin's voices getting deeper as they reach puberty, and in the end, they get new voices which are more childish; this was done to represent their voice actor change. In the Brazilian dub, however, Gumball already started the episode with his new voice actor, and Darwin's hadn't even reached puberty yet. Plus, in the end of the episode, all that happens in the dub is their voice being digitally altered to be high-pitched.
    • Something similar happened in Season 5's "The Copycats", where Gumball and Darwin randomly switch voice actors again. In the dub, they stayed with the exact same voice, not even with pitch change.
    • The Italian dub had a similar issue: in "The Kids" Gumball and Darwin's voices are pitch shifted to hide that the voice actors were reaching puberty (and the thing was kept until "The Shell", where both of them were recast) and the voices they have at the beginning and at the end of the episode are identical. In "The Copycats", like in the Brazilian dubs, Gumball and Darwin freak as their voices changed except they still have the same voices.
  • Also a Brazilian dub example; in "The Fraud", the Coach (who is a Lady Looks Like a Dude) says "I'm not a woman... who can say she's not lied on her resume either." Brazil translated that line as "I'm not a woman. Who can say they've never lied on the resume?", leading many people to believe Coach is a man and her daughter Jamie has two dads.
    • In fact, the Brazilian dub of the Coach's debut episode has her already referring to herself with the female variant of her profession (since there's no gender neutral version), and Gumball and Darwin refer to her as "treinadora" for the rest of the episode, thus killing the joke at the end.
• Animaniacs: In one of the two Dutch dubs, a lyric in the Pinky and the Brain theme is: "Geboren in het lab, een sterk, de ander slap.". However, Pinky is not stronger than Brain or vice-verse.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender:
  • Two examples in the Russian dub:
    • The dub uses the word "magic" instead of "bending". Water magic, fire magic, etc. So Katara's Insistent Terminology line of dialogue to Sokka in the first episode — "It's not magic, it's waterbending" — was instead rendered as "it's not simple sorcery, but water magic".
    • When Aang asks Master Pakku for a permission to train alongside his friend, he doesn't use the gender-neutral word "friend", but specifically the Russian word for "female friend". Later, Pakku refuses to train Katara because she's female, as if he didn't already know her gender from Aang's words.
  • In the Brazilian dub, Smellerbee is dubbed as a boy in most episodes, until the episode where she reveals she was a girl and gets voiced by a female. However, by the time of the next episode, her male voice actor returns.
• Done in-universe in an episode of Batman: The Brave and the Bold, which adapts a story from the old Batman manga through the lens of ancient anime dubs. At the end of the story, the villain, Lord Death Man, is very clearly killed when he crashes his helicopter into a transmission tower. Robin then declares, in an oddly hasty tone, that he's certain Lord Death Man parachuted to safety, despite there being no such parachute in the footage and a shot of Lord Death Man's mask being incinerated by the explosion. Bat-Mite, the host of the episode, then winks at the viewer.
• The Albanian dub of Blue's Clues only dubbed 16 episodes Out of Order, with the episodes being cherrypicked from just 4 seasons (no episodes from season 4 or 6 were dubbed). This also means that Steve was only the host for 8 episodes before being abruptly replaced by Joe with no explanation given.
• The Polish dub of Dexter's Laboratory does not give Dexter an accent, which makes the episode "Accent You Hate", about Dexter being bullied because of his accent, nonsensical. In addition, none of the kids being bullied have accents either.
• In one episode of DuckTales (1987), Fenton Crackshell tries to disguise himself as Scrooge. The nephews tell him that he also has to sound like Scrooge. In the original English version, this means of course that Fenton has to imitate a Scottish accent. In the German dub, he Scooge has no accent, so Fenton starts speaking in a ridiculous undefinable accent for no reason.
  • The Italian dub have a similar issue, with Fenton first going all wrong with French and German accents and then speaking with his regular voice... which according to the nephews is a perfect impression of "the Scrooge accent".
• In the Russian dub of The Fairly OddParents!, Vicky is Timmy's sister instead of having her own seperate family. Which is kind of strange, considering she doesn't live with the Turner family and instead lives with Tootie, who is not Vicky's sister in the dub.

• While Family Guy has never taken off in France, its sister show American Dad! has. However, because both shows (plus The Cleveland Show) have occasionally crossed over, this has caused confusion for a number of French fans who aren't familiar with Family Guy.
• The Latin American Spanish dub of Gargoyles had the gargoyles receive their name in the future, and are named after places of the modern USA (ex: Bronx). Yet, we see them call themselves by those names in the flashbacks of the past. It's quite silly seeing someone named Hudson in the year 988 in Scotland. Also, "Demona" is called by that name by the other gargoyles, even when they shouldn't have known humans had named her that.

• The English dub of Kaeloo screwed up the main character's sex. She was re-dubbed into a male until the 11th episode in which someone finally called her a she, then proceeded to point it out in an argument over who gets to play the (male) lead in a role playing game. Since that episode, she's been consistently referred to as a she. None of the prior episodes were fixed to reflect this, and the change in gender pronouns is treated as if everyone had always known what equipment she had down there.
  • It has to be noted that, even in the original French dub, the characters are not always sure of Kaeloo's gender^note  This may be due to her tendency to turn into a huge toad when angry: in French, the word for "frog" is female, but the word for "toad" is male, and Bad Kaeloo speaks with a male voice indeed, especially in season 2. Whether this was inspired by the English dub or simply added for the sake of some jokes is anybody's guess.
• Hungary's dub of Kim Possible suffered from various problems, but the clueless translation was the worst offender. For example, in an early episode, Kim's sitting in detention, and one of her mates makes a remark about the nanobot on her nose, thinking it to be a zit. In the dub, he instead asks "You've been busted?", to which the other guy replies "Cheerleaders don't have zits".

• The Little Lulu Show has the Greek dubs of the episode "Beautiful Lulu". In the original version, Tubby says "homeliest" in a muffled voice, because he's eating chocolate, and Iggy says his toe is prettier than Lulu while they're making fun of her. The first Greek dub makes the mistake of having Tubby blatantly say "The most popular girl in the neighborhood" (counts as Woolseyism because "popular" and "ugly" sound alike in Greek) and Lulu says "he said I was 1 metre with my hands up" as if Tubby said that instead of Iggy. The second dub makes no mistake on the muffled voice, but still gets the toe thing wrong because Iggy's line is omitted.

• The Loud House: The Season 1 episode "Undie Pressure" features the Loud siblings in a challenge to resist as much as possible without indulging into their "annoying habits". Leni and Luna's habits are respectively saying "like" too often and speaking in a British accent. The Italian dub completely removed those character habits from other episodes (with Luna's being sometimes worked around by having her use some Gratuitous English words), and as a result they come up here as a form of Compressed Vice.
  • Similarly, in the Brazilian dub of the same episode, Luna's annoying habit is changed to "yelling too much", which makes sense considering that's what she was doing before Lincoln set the bet and how she lost the bet (by yelling at the phone in order to be heard by the radio host). It does, however, make the parts where she started speaking in a Swedish accent a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment, and the British accent is still mentioned by the radio contest she was trying to participate in.

• Miraculous Ladybug: In the earlier English dub episodes, Hawk Moth says more than once that he wants to use the power of the Ladybug and Cat Miraculouses to Take Over the World. It's established in later episodes after his identity is revealed that his actual goal is to use them to bring back his missing wife, making the Generic Doomsday Villain talk seem out of place when the implications of using the two Miraculouses combined are revealed.

• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • In the Russian dub, "Princess Luna", "Nightmare Moon" and "Mare in the Moon" are all translated as "Lunnaya Poni" (Moon Pony), with ensuing hilarity like "You are the Moon Pony — Moon Pony!".
  • The Hungarian dub doesn't translate the names, but neither does it bother to translate titles (such as "Mare in the Moon"), leading to a very bizarre dub, where the characters seem to be arbitrarily switching between languages. Promo material explains that "The ponies have beautiful English names", but... that doesn't make any sense.
  • In "Boast Busters", the Japanese dub accidentally has Snips outright state in front of Spike that he plans to bring an Ursa Major to Ponyville, but Spike doesn't do anything to talk them out of it, which is probably what he would have done if he heard it in the original.
  • The opening for the Japanese dub is longer to make room for the Alternative Foreign Theme Song, and there is also an added talk segment at the end of every episode. To accommodate the extra scenes they've had to cut about a minute of the actual episodes out, and while they tried to cut out only the more minor scenes, it's occasionally led to a few plot holes. For example, in the first episode, the scene of Twilight mentioning the book she needed from Spike is cut out, but this leads to Spike somehow knowing the book she needed despite her not mentioning the title in the Japanese version.
  • The Croatian dub by HRT has a few instances of this:
    • In "A Canterlot Wedding", with the translation team localizing almost every name, they wound up translating Cadance's name as "Kadenca", which isn't a problem in and of itself - except for the fact that it's pronounced exactly the same as "Cadenza" from her full name, making it confusing as to why Twilight hadn't reacted to her full name when the name she knew is basically a shortened form of the full name. It also leads Shining Armor to say "Princess Mi Amore Cadenza is Cadenza" when Twilight asks who the princess is.
    • The very first episode (or rather the second half, due to every episode being split in half) has a particularly glaring one during Twilight's encounter with Fluttershy. To be exact, when Twilight asks Fluttershy what her name is, Fluttershy's voice actor audibly says her name instead of muffling it... and Twilight's lines about her not hearing her well are kept in, making the dialogue come across as inconsistent. The inconsistency sticks out even more with Fluttershy telling her name to Spike (which is where she was supposed to say her name out loud for the first time), because now Twilight suddenly knows her name despite having heard it before twice.
    • A minor one in "Dragon Quest": just as Rainbow Dash, Rarity and Twilight are about to enter the dragon den in a dragon disguise, Twilight remarks that they'll never pass if the dragons hear 3 voices coming from the fake dragon. The plot hole stems from the fact that all three of the characters involved are voiced by the same person by this point in the series - who doesn't even make a distinction between each voice - and as a result Twilight's remark looks out of place because the aforementioned "three voices" sound far too alike for said remark to make much sense.
    • In "Sonic Rainboom", when Rarity flies up to cast a variety of colored sunrays with her new wings, Rainbowshine has the exact same line as Foggy Fleece ("I could watch you fly all day!"). Because Rainbowshine's original line was about her suggesting that Rarity should enter the competition and Rarity still replies as if she heard her say it, it becomes unclear where Rarity suddenly got the idea of entering the competition and why she's saying "Maybe I should enter" when no one proposed the idea to begin with.
    • Big Mac being called "Veliki brat" ("Big Brother"), while otherwise okay if a bit generic, is brought into question in "Hearts and Hooves Day". Namely, the plot of this episode revolves around the Cutie Mark Crusaders finding a perfect stallion for Cheerilee on Hearts and Hooves day, who just so happens to be Big Mac; this is where his localized name creates an awkward situation because when Cheerilee refers to Big Mac directly, she sounds like she's calling him her brother (due to him literally being called "big brother") with the romantic elements kept in, basically making an implication of Brother–Sister Incest and Cheerilee somehow being related to Apple Bloom without explanation.
  • The Croatian RTL dub has done this by airing seasons out of order, leading to massive status quo changes that have yet to be covered in the dub. It began with season 1, with the last episode of course ending off on "The Best Night Ever", and on the next broadcast a couple of years later that would air new episodes, it started with the premiere from season four. This means that the dub jumped from the main characters going to the Grand Galloping Gala in the last episode to a scene with Twilight (who now all of a sudden has wings) learning how to fly and being referred to as a princess, various characters making references to her becoming a princess and the main characters somehow knowing exactly who's (possibly) behind the strange occurrences despite the fact none of the aforementioned events have taken place during season 1. This also results in Discord being introduced in this episode with no explanation as to how he appeared.

• The Dutch dub of Peppa Pig has the character Penny Polar Bear renamed to 'Irene Ijsbeer'. However, in the Dutch dub of her debut episode, her moms still call her Penny.
  • Richard Rabbit was also mistakenly referred to by the narrator as Conrad Konijn instead of Karel Konijn (His actual Dutch name) in some episodes. "Conrad Konijn" is actually the Dutch name of Robbie Rabbit.

• When Ready Jet Go! premiered in Sri Lanka, the first installment to be dubbed in Sinhala was the Back to Bortron 7 special. They removed all the songs, even the theme song. Each song in the special is crucial to the plot, so as a result, the Sinhala dub creates plot holes regarding how Sean is convinced to go to Bortron 7, how Sean bonds with Jet, the Bortron solar system, the history of Bortron 7, and the kids saving Carrot and Celery's presentation — without the songs, Sri Lankans will be confused, and think these developments came out of nowhere.

• The original French dub of Rugrats (1991) season 1 from 1992 had the Pickles and Deville families use the same surname, "De La Tranche", even though Phil and Lil aren't related to Tommy or Angelica in any way. In the 1997 Canal J redub of the show, "Deville" was kept as "De La Tranche", but "Pickles" was changed to "Cornichon" (literally "Pickle").

• South Park: The Japanese dub removed the episode "A Ladder to Heaven", probably due to cultural sensitivity. However, this resulted in the dub not establishing why Cartman gets briefly possessed by Kenny in every subsequent episode until the episode "The Biggest Douche in the Universe" (in "A Ladder to Heaven", he drank Kenny's ashes after mistaking them for chocolate milk mix). A clip from the dropped episode was even retained in their dub of "Casa Bonita".

• In the Dutch dub of Shimmer and Shine, whenever Zac appears in season 1 after the genies already arrive at Leah's house, Leah says "Dat is Zac! Hij weet niet dat ik geestjes heb!", before telling Shimmer and Shine to hide. This implies that Zac doesn't know about Shimmer and Shine yet, but is allowed to, unlike in the English version, where Leah says that Zac can't know she has genies.

• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • The Latin American Spanish dub of the episode "Pickles" accidentally translated the word "patty" as "cangrejo" (which is the Spanish for crab) in the scenes where SpongeBob names the ingredients for the Krabby Patty, which can lead the viewers to believe that Krabby Patties are made out of crab. This coincidentally ties to a popular fan theory about Mr. Krabs killing his own kind and serving them as the patties of the Krabby Patties, and many Hispanic fans have tried to point out these scenes as evidence.
  • Inverted in the Brazilian dub of the episode "SpongeBob's Last Stand". In the original version, SpongeBob mistakenly calls Sandy by the full name "Sandy Squirrel", instead of her actual full name "Sandy Cheeks", as for a while, post-movie episodes ignored her original surname. However, the Brazilian Portuguese dubbing fixed this by having SpongeBob instead name her as "Sandy Bochechas", which is the literal translation for "Sandy Cheeks".

• In the Russian dub of Tangled: The Series, the Sundrop Flower was for some reason named "the moon flower", even though it was obviously golden, was said to have grown from a drop of sunlight in the movie, and Rapunzel's appearance was sun-themed. This created problems later when the Moonstone Opal was revealed, at which point the dub switched to calling the Sundrop Flower "the golden flower".

• In Japan, the third season of The Transformers was rebranded as Transformers 2010, and stated to take place in that year—about five years after The Transformers: The Movie, which happened in 2005, and a change from the original, which took place only about a year later in 2006. This doesn't change much until you look at Daniel Witwicky, who was twelve in the movie and hasn't changed at all in appearance or maturity. Reasonable if he's thirteen now, not so much if he's seventeen. A later toy bio added the retcon that he'd been put in stasis for a few years at some point.

• The Japanese dub of Transformers: Animated renamed Bulkhead "Ironhide" to make him more recognizable to the audience of the movie. This caused a problem when the actual Ironhide appeared in the second season, with an appearance actually based on his G1 incarnation. The Japanese dub renamed this Ironhide "Armorhide".

• Winx Club regarding the 4Kids Entertainment dub:
  • In one episode, Tecna shot a "Sphere of Truth" at a teacher she thought was evil without any ill effect, but then the teacher turned out to be an evil clone much later, the very kind of thing her spell was supposed to expose. It had been originally a plasma sphere.
  • In Season 3, Icy supposedly gets a new fire power from the season's Big Bad and boasts about it. Yet just a few minutes later, she attacks Bloom (who has a similar fire power, only more powerful) with nothing but her usual ice attacks. In the orginal version, Icy doesn't get a new power and the fire was just there for show.
  • In the first season, Musa is constantly referred to as a princess, something made up for the American dub, to the point where even Icy makes a comment about her palace guards. This caused problems when the second season went into her past and revealed her parents were starving artists, with her mother's death being partially attributed to her family being unable to afford medicine. In an attempt to fix this, a line was inserted about Musa's dad being a "former prince" and revealed that Musa was simply lying about her past. This was not a very convincing explanation since Musa was somehow able to pass herself off as the heir to the throne of an entire planet.
    • This caused further problems when the actual princess of Musa's realm, Galatea, was introduced in the third season. To address this, it was outright stated that Musa was from a different planet, but Musa later earns her Enchantix by saving her from a fire. It's an important plot point that the fairies earn their Enchantix by saving the life of someone from their planet (and Bloom, as the sole survivor of Domino, cannot earn one.) Notably, a scene with Stella and Aisha commenting on how Musa earned her Enchantix had to be cut.
  • In the first season, in a scheme to steal her powers, the Trix trick Bloom into reading a book that warns her that she's the incarnation of the Ancestral Witches, and that they'll take possession of her after she becomes a full fairy. Both 4kids (and Nickelodeon) change it to tricking Bloom into thinking she's really a witch. Not only is Bloom's ability to turn into a fairy in every episode completely ignored by this change, it makes even less sense when later episodes confirm witches aren't evil, with the other witches helping Alfea against the Trix, and that they can even become fairies, like Mirta.
  • Inverted in "Tears From The Black Willow"; the girls need to collect healing water but are warned not to touch it or they'll turn younger. After Darcy strips the water of its healing magic, Flora jumps in to save her sister. In the original, her sacrifice somehow breaks the spell while she's still underwater, although it doesn't affect her. There's no explanation as to why the water didn't hurt Flora in the original. The 4kids edit has Flora reverse the spell by herself after she escapes, fixing the plot hole.
  • Inverted with Bloom's healing powers in the second season. One episode has Icy outright kill Sky and Bloom uses her powers to save him. Bloom's apparent ability to raise the dead is not brought up for the rest of the series, so changing it to Icy putting Sky under a sleeping spell actually makes more sense. Played straight in that despite this change, they still left in a line regarding Sky not having a pulse.

---