Writers Cannot Do Math / Western Animation

Bad mathematics in western animation.

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• In the late Adventure Time episode "Temple of Mars", Betty mentions the author of a long math equation "forgot to double cube root the bottom partialnominator". The closest this comes to making sense is to either sixth-root the term (root 2×3), or cube-root the term and multiply it by 2, but she instead changes the term from being multiplied by 0 to being multiplied by 8. She could have meant "two cube" without the "root", which is indeed equal to 8. That being said, the show is full of science/fantasy Technobabble all the time, so it's probably not meant to make any sense.
• American Dad!
  • "100 A.D." frequently teases the gimmick of the fact that the episode will have 100 characters dying to celebrate it being the 100th episode. Later in the episode, there's a scene involving a bus crash full of minor characters from past seasons which is said to account for 96 of the 100 deaths. Problem is, if one stops and counts all the characters on the bus they'll see that it's filled with less than 50 of them.
  • "Less Money, Mo' Problems" has Stan placing a bet with Hayley and Jeff that he and Francine can live on minimum wage for a month. At the end of the episode when he returns home and accepts defeat Hayley mentions that he'd only been gone less than two days, except that it was shown to be night three times before he returned.
  • "The Kidney Stays in the Picture" has Stan and Francine go back to the year 1996 to ensure that their daughter Hayley is conceived. The problem occurs up when you realize that because the episode aired in 2012, this would make Hayley 16 years old.^note Probably not even that if you consider that the "Macarena" - heavily used in the background of the episode - was at its peak popularity in the summer/early fall of 1996 in the United States (it started its fourteen-week run at #1 in August and fell out the top spot in November), but of course, the "Macarena" also held the record for the longest climb to the top spot for 23 years (over two chart runs - the first ending in December 1995, with the song returning to the charts the following June and reaching #1 in August), so it really depends on what part of the year the episode largely takes place in. So, even if Hayley was conceived at the earliest of January 1996 and born about nine months later, she would've likely been 15 by the episode's airdate of April 2012. Seeing as how she's a married college student, that doesn't seem likely. Especially since the episode's plot is kicked off by her binge-drinking at a restaurant with her mother. Additionally, she stated all the way back in "Stan Knows Best" that she was 18 and turned 19 by "One Fish, Two Fish". If anything, the 1996 conception date would be slightly better suited for Steve, Hayley's younger brother.
  • Steve is explicitly 14 throughout the series though for some reason, he celebrates his 14th birthday in an episode several seasons in though he should've already celebrated it since most freshmen (Steve's grade) are 14/15 when they start high school.
• Animaniacs:
  • In a Pinky and the Brain short called "Puppet Rulers", the eponymous mice are living presumably in the 50s and the Brain frequently states that they will freeze themselves for forty years, though later on a caption reads "Thirty Years Later" and the Brain correctly acknowledges them as being in the 90s. (Maybe it was 1959, and Brain just rounded down.)
  • In another Pinky and the Brain short entitled "Brain Meets Brawn", Pinky accidentally shrinks the Brain four times with his repeated apologies, then restores him to his normal size by hitting (and thus angering) him only three times, though it's possible that some instances shrink or grow him moreso than others, supported by the fact that Pinky's final apology at the end of the episode shrinks the Brain all the way down to the size he was after Pinky had apologized four times.
• Arthur: In "Buster Makes the Grade", Buster gets tutored in mathematics by his classmates. One method is Francine and Muffy teaching division with double-dip peanut fudge pieces. Francine asks Buster to divide twenty pieces evenly between the two of them, which he does. Then, Francine asks Buster to divide the same number of pieces between themselves and Muffy. This is impossible, as twenty cannot be divided evenly by three. After getting this wrong, Buster "solves" this by chowing down on his share.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender:
  • The show struggles with the ages and lifespans of Avatars consistently. It's stated that Avatars having long lifespans, with Avatar Kyoshi having specifically stated to have lived 230 years. However some avatars have entirely average lifespans. Koh the Face Stealer mentions stealing the face of an Avatar's lover 800-900 years ago, but we later learn that the Avatar he was talking about was Kuruk, who was only born less than 400 years previously, although this is possibly a retcon.
  • As related to the above, In “The Warriors of Kyoshi”, it’s said that Kyoshi was born on the island four hundred years ago. Aang has been in the iceberg for a hundred years and Roku lived to be seventy. Meaning Kyoshi lived to be 230. They likely hadn’t worked out the timeline at that point because it’s only the fourth episode but they backed themselves into a corner with her age. Wizards Live Longer of course but there’s no one else in the franchise who’s been implied to have lived that long. Aang is the next most Long-Lived character and he died at (chronologically) 166.
  • The generation and timeline of the Hundred Year War gets very messy as well. In season 2, Azulon was said to have ruled for 23 years, making Ozai the Fire Lord for the last 6-7 years of the war, and Sozin for the first 70 years and however long before it's start. Then, during the third season, the website states that Sozin died at the age of 102, but he's clearly older than 32 when he starts the war in "The Avatar and the Fire Lord". Word of God then stated that Sozin ruled for the first 20 years of the war, Azulon the next 75 years, and Ozai the last 5.
  • The other side of the Fire Nation Royal Family doesn't have enough generations to have possibly spanned the 100 year war: Roku, the Avatar before Aang, turns out to be the grandfather to Ursa, Zuko and Azula's mother, the latter being 14 at series start. Roku died about 12 years before Aang was frozen (and the War began), so 112 years before the series's beginning. The Search shows Roku to be Ursa's maternal grandfather, with Roku's daughter and Ursa's mother being a woman named Rina. Even if Rina was born right before Roku died, she and Ursa must have given birth at the age of 49 years at the very least. When you also take into account how Roku and his wife were quite old when he died (they had a Childhood Friend Romance, so they're about the same age) and that Ursa is clearly younger than 50 during the flashbacks to Zuko's childhood, there's no way Rina could have possibly given birth to Ursa late enough for this to make sense. The comics also introduce Ursa’s daughter Kiyi from her second marriage and she’s been remarried for five years, meaning Kiyi is probably four to Zuko’s nineteen. This means Ursa would have been in her mid-sixties when she gave birth to her using the bad math.
  • Shyu (who was 60 during the show) mentioned that his grandfather knew Avatar Roku. We later see that his grandfather Kaja was the Great Sage when Roku was about 26 and looked to be at least in his 50s. This would make Kaja at least 140 (probably more) years older than his grandson, and Shyu seems to imply that he personally knew his grandfather.
  • Roku says he's learned the elements in a thousand lifespans but we later find out that the Avatar has existed for 10,000 years. That would imply that the average Avatar lived ten years. However, there is the possibility he was exaggerating and didn't literally mean there had been one thousand Avatars.
  • In a more mild example, Ty Lee remarks to Mai that the latter was "an only child for 15 years", implying that Mai is 17, as her younger brother is specified to be two years old. However, Word of God says Mai is 15 at the time of the series.
• Batman Beyond:
  • The series originally took place in the year 2039, being referred to as taking place forty years after the end of Batman: The Animated Series (1999). Later on, the creators of the show announced that the show takes place fifty years after the end of Justice League Unlimited (2006), meaning that would place the date at 2056 instead. However, the characters make explicit references to events that happened in the previous series as being no more than forty years ago. Certain sources even give Terry McGinnis a birthdate of 2023. The 2010 Batman Beyond comic series once again confirms the date as being 2039, and thus only forty years passing.
  • Batman Beyond 2.0 issue #16 has Barbara expressing her belief to Dick that he's held Sam against her for twenty years ^note both are in their mid-late sixties at this point, but the flashback to the day of Barbara's wedding depicts both characters looking as they did in the 90's cartoon, when they were (presumably) in their early-mid 20's. Could be a case of them still looking young for their age in the flashback, but still worth noting — especially since Commissioner Gordon is shown as alive.
• CatDog: In the episode "Smarter than the Average Dog" when Cat becomes a genius he exclaims "Circumference equals Pi radius squared!" Pi radius squared is the area of a circle, not the circumference.
• The Time Travel episode of Darkwing Duck has the eponymous hero go back to the 1950s, when he was in elementary school. A different episode seems to depicts him attending high school in the 1970s, if the clothes and hairstyles of the students are any indication.
• Defenders of the Earth featured the 27th Phantom in the year 2015. The show was made in 1986, and at the time the present-day Phantom was stated to be the 21st in line. The mantle of The Phantom is usually passed on from father to son, which would be quite a feat to do six times within 29 years. A later animated spinoff, Phantom 2040 was more reasonable about this with its main character being the 23rd Phantom (in the year 2040).
• Dexter's Laboratory:
  • When Dexter has to pay off a $200 million debt to NASA in "Dexter's Debt", he gets one dollar and then says he only has $199,900,999 to go. Someone forgot two nines.
  • In "Nuclear Confusion", Dexter tells his computer to decipher a clue Dee Dee left to find something she stole from him, namely "r squared". The computer then figures it meant to check the pies his mother made, because pi(e) equals r². That's not true; it was probably supposed to be how pi times r² equals the area of a circle—the correct formula was even shown on-screen.
  • "Ice Cream Scream" centers on Dexter trying to buy ice cream from a vendor that hates him for buying a ridiculously expensive item with pennies, indirectly ruining his life. Him counting the pennies at an "average human rate" took about five-and-a-half hours, and the on-screen price for the items was $16, thus 1600 pennies. That would mean the ice cream man was counting at the ridiculously slow pace of about 12 seconds per penny—it would have taken less than an hour even if took two seconds each, which is still fairly slow.
• Doug: In "Doug's Bad Trip", the final episode of the Nickelodeon series, Doug and his family go to the Great Painted Gorge. Along the way, they detour for three tourist traps. They depart at 8 AM, and, even with the detours, arrive at the Painted Gorge at 7 AM the next day, in time to see the sunrise. They appear to be traveling at about 40 M. P. H. on the road, which means that the entire trip, including the detours, was about 920 miles. However, several hours into the trip, Doug's father, Phil, states that they still have 1,500 miles to go. The signs for the tourist traps say that they are 125, 75, and 300 miles away. This means that going to them and getting back on the road would take more than a day. At the first tourist trap, called "It" (which is just a strangely-shaped potato), Phil states that the time is 2:37 PM. It's not even dark by the time that they reach the third tourist trap, Blythe Field. Each detour couldn't have been more than 15 minutes (in other words, not more than 10 miles) each way.

• DuckTales (2017): Scrooge McDuck is well over 100 years old. His nephew Donald, who is his younger sister's son, is in his thirties. The writers explicitly know this doesn't make sense, go and just suggest ignoring it.
• Family Guy:
  • Quagmire was stated to be born in 1946 (1948 on the DVD) . This is a deliberately implausible retcon that's played for laughs; in "Fist Full of Meg", he stated he went to high school in 1986, when he would be at least forty. On top of that he's shown, in a previous episode, to be an older adult in 1988.
  • In "Back to the Pilot", pairs of Brian and Stewie arrive via time travel and vote on 9/11. Before the vote, the on screen crowd appears too small to make up the final tally of 99; after the vote, the crowd appears over twice as large as the number of votes counted, meaning out of a much larger crowd, not everyone voted. They question why the total number of votes was an odd number (Peter would make the number odd anyway, but Peter votes yes and no, cancelling his own vote); out of fifty pairs who voted, one Brian got killed, as if there were only one hundred pairs present. Could be handwaved by the number of Stewie and Brian pairs continuously time-travelling in during the vote and being counted in the spur of the moment.
• In Futurama, this is constantly made fun of with Bender's composition materials. He often remarks how he's 30 or 40% of something (Iron, Titanium, Scrap Metal, Lucky Horseshoes, Dolemite, Zinc, etc.) which accumulatively sums up to between 150% and 330% or more! Otherwise, most episodes tend to show as much accurate math as possible. It helps that one of the writers, Ken Keeler, has a degree in Applied Mathematics.
• Gravity Falls:
  • Stan and Ford's mother was holding a baby when Stan was kicked out of the house. Presumably, said baby is supposed to be Shermie, grandfather to Dipper and Mabel, though this never actually confirmed. If the baby is Shermie however, then you have "more than ten years" pass before Stan and Ford see each other again, and then thirty before Stan can free Ford from the portal. At which point Shermy is about forty, but with twelve-year-old grandkids? Even if you assume that "more than ten years" is closer to twenty, which wouldn't really work with the timeline either (minor details suggest Stan was kicked out around 1968-70, and the series takes place in 2012), you'd still be cutting things pretty close. This is eventually lampshaded with a background gag in the Lost Legends graphic novel, with a conspiracy board placing the blame for this goof on time traveler Blendin Blandin.
  • Stan at one point says he's "pushing 70", but given that he and Ford were no older than 12 in "1960-something", he should be closer to 60 than to 70 in the present. Of course, given that this is Stan, he could have been just reflexively lying about his age.
• Hey Arnold!:
  • 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 himself 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 the movie, Phil mentions that his grandfather participated in the Tomato Incident which took place in the 1770s-1780s.
  • Minor example, but he also mentioned that his father won the boarding house in a card game in the 1890s. In all the flashbacks we see of Phil's childhood in the 1920s, his father looks no younger than his 40s.
  • Phil and Gertie are in their early eighties with a nine-year-old grandson. This means that they'd have been in their forties or fifties when they had Arnold's father Miles. It's possible that Miles was older when he and Stella had Arnold, but this is unlikely as he looks to be in his late-twenties to early thirties at the time. It's possible that this was intentional, but it's more likely a case of this.
• Jem aired from 1985 to 1989. One of the Starlight Girls, Ba Nee, is 8 and was born during the Vietnam War. Her mother was a Vietnamese woman and her father an American soldier. America withdrew from the war in 1973, meaning that Ba Nee should be 12 at youngest.
• Jane from The Jetsons is thirty-three, and her oldest child, Judy, is seventeen. Unless adopted, she had her at sixteen years old. We doubt it was intentional, since the series is from the '60s.
• King of the Hill: Hank and his friends are all canonically born in 1953, however, it's also said that they graduated from high school in 1974, when they would've been 21, far too old for HS.
• Looney Tunes:
  • Three Friz Freleng cartoons from the Warner Bros. stable have this problem.
    • In Boulevardier From The Bronx (1936), Dizzy Dan's team the Giants is already up 2-0 when they score two additional runs (on an inside-the-park homer and a four-base error) which made the score 4-0. But in the bottom of the ninth, where pitcher Dizzy Dan intentionally walks the bases loaded just so he can strike out hayseed Claude (who winds up hitting a grand slam), the scoreboard reads 3-0.
    • In 1946's Baseball Bugs, in four innings the Gas House Gorillas score 96 runs against the Tea Totallers. Enter Bugs Bunny, assuming all nine positions for the Tea Totallers and scores 96 runs himself. However, the score in the bottom of the ninth reads Bugs Bunny 96, Gorillas 95.
    • In "The Wabbit Who Came to Supper", going by the deductions as listed in the special delivery letter, Elmer is actually left with a net inheritance from his late Uncle Louie of $902,934.04, rather than a debt of $1.98.
  • In Chuck Jones's 1945 cartoon Hare Tonic, Bugs asks Elmer a couple basic multiplication questions. When asked to multiply "3 • 3", Elmer replies "6". Bugs does not correct him and say "9".
  • Frank Tashlin's "Porky Pig's Feat" (1943) shows Porky's and Daffy's hotel bill, which is totaled at $152.50. A second look at the bill and adding the items all up ($65 room, $20 bath, $32 bed, $15 air, $12.50 sunshine, $17.50 goodwill and $10.50 extra goodwill) shows an actual total of $175.50.
• In the Kim Possible episode "Ron Millionaire", Ron becomes Nouveau Riche after receiving $99 million in royalties from his invention of the Naco and at one point Kim quips that he's now "just south of billionaire.” However, while Ron is indeed very rich, what he's actually "just south of" is $100 million, still only a tenth of the way to becoming a billionaire.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • The series frequently refers to moons as a period, but no instantiation of the period makes any sense whatsoever. For example, if placed at a month the Apple Family Reunion, which takes place every 100 moons, would only take place every eight years, despite far less time taking place since the last reunion. Of course this is a setting where the moon's path is manually controlled by the sometimes-whimsical Princesses, so it might well not even have a direct equivalent. The show's director would later admit that this is case, before adding that they just use it whenever they feel the timeline doesn't matter.
  • In one episode, Twilight mentions that Ponyville wrapped up winter the same way for hundreds of years. But in a much later episode, Granny Smith recited a story where she was a young mare, and Ponyville didn't exist yet. So either ponies live hundreds of years, Twilight was wrong, or Granny Smith was spinning a tell tale.
  • In "Rainbow Falls", Rainbow Dash notes only the four fastest teams can make it to the Equestria Games; during the medal ceremony in the end, it shows five qualified teams.
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998):
  • In one episode, the girls traveled back in time to the 1950s and met The Professor, Ms. Keane, and Sara Bellum in elementary school. Since the show was at various points indicated to take place around the same year it was made (1998-2005) that'd make those characters in their mid-to-late fifties, and they just don't look like it.
  • "Power-noia" has Blossom in a nightmare realm where her fear is failing a test at school. When she finds that it was all staged by Him, Blossom puts her game face on. Him!Ms. Keane asks her what the square root of seven is, Blossom responds "Seven doesn't have a square root. It's prime!" Technically, this is wrong. Prime numbers do have square roots; the issue is whether or not the square root of 7 is a rational (i.e. recitable) number, which it is not.
• Ready Jet Go!: In "Mindy's Ice Rink", Sean says that winter will come in six months. The episode takes place in July, and since December is the start of winter, that means winter will come in five months.
• The citizens of Mainframe in ReBoot exist inside a computer and, as such, live their lives at a much faster rate than we do; i.e., a nano spent in Mainframe is like a minute/hour spent in real life, a second is comparable to a day, a minute to a month, etc. However, time runs faster inside the Games, which is how Enzo and AndrAIa could grow up in Season 3. So... how can the User play games so quickly? Shouldn't games change time in the exact opposite manner?
• In The Simpsons:
  • In "$pringfield (Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Legalized Gambling)", Homer quotes the Scarecrow attempting to describe the Pythagorean theorem in The Wizard of Oz, which itself is an example of this trope, 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.
  • When Bart gets put in an advanced math class in "Bart the Genius", the teacher makes a joke that requires flagrant disregard of proper algebraic syntax in order to turn an equation into "rdrr" (or "har de har har".) The "proper" form of the equation is also written as "y=r(3/3)", which is just "y=r" with a completely meaningless fraction added to it.
  • In "Lisa's Sax", which aired in 1997, they identify 1990 as "five years ago" instead of 1992. This was due to the episode having gotten produced during season 7 (1995-96) and not airing till season 9 (1997-98).
  • In "Bart's Girlfriend", there's a scene that shows Bart crossing out days on a calendar before revealing he was counting the number of days on the calendar and re-marking the first day. However, Bart's calendar shows April with 31 days instead of 30. Additionally, it shows April starting on a Monday, when April 1, 1994 was actually a Friday. It also shows May having 30 days instead of 31, starting on a Wednesday when May 1, 1994 was actually a Sunday, and it also shows June starting on a Tuesday when June 1, 1994 was actually a Wednesday (at least they correctly showed June having 30 days).
  • In "The Great Louse Detective", Frank Grimes is revealed to have had an adult son, despite being stated to be 35 in "Homer's Enemy". For this to make sense, the mother would have had to have slept with him when he was still a minor.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars: In "Legacy of Terror", Anakin and Obi-Wan enter the tunnels beneath the Progate Temple with a squad of eight clones, including Commander Cody. Two get abducted down small side tunnels in their first confrontation with the Geonosian zombies, and two more are killed when sent back in an attempt to reach the surface and call for reinforcements. Yet, somehow, there are five troopers left when they get to the Queen's chamber when there should be four.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003): The episode "Timing Is Everything", from the Fast Forward season has some big miscalculations with the dates of the events of the show. Don and Splinter witness their past counterparts 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 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.
• It appears the Total Drama writers have problems with basic counting:
  • For example, whenever Chris has to count the amount of campers left during a challenge (in the second episode of Island). Or, when they said the tenth camper to arrive on the island was "contestant number nine", which may be the root of the Trent's number nine obsession from Action, either that or Chris lost track of the head count.
  • They also can't seem to figure out exactly how much time passes between episodes. Sometimes, the characters say it was a week since the last episode, which would require Island to last 24 weeks, not eight. It's usually said that there are three days between challenges, though, which implies the season lasts around ten weeks. ^note Given that Island is a parody of Survivor where the same thing happens, this may be intentional, but it's unlikely the writers thought it through. For that matter, the time counter in the second episode means that that episode's challenge lasted for three and a half days, and that some of the campers slept continuously for most of that.
  • In the second episode of Action, Gwen says she was a runner-up "last year," but the Island special had established that Island takes place exactly two days before Action. Since Heather's still fully bald in Action, it's highly unlikely a full year had already passed.
  • In the episode "Evil Dread", the challenge is to find seven buried pieces of a landmark model and put it together. Lightning costs the team the victory by exclaiming they've got all seven pieces when in fact they only had six, thus wasting precious time. However, the Villainous Vultures actually found either nine or ten pieces. First one by Heather, then Scott, then Gwen, then Jo (stolen by Lightning), then Lightning (taken by Jo), then Lightning again (he's got two pieces, but one of them might be the one he stole from Jo), then Alejandro, then Lightning again, and the final piece is found by Heather and Jo. With the exception of Lightning holding two pieces, these finds are specific scenes with character interaction, so they're not animation errors.
• A Totally Spies! episode implies the high school aged protagonists were tweens in The '80s. The show takes place in the mid 2000s.
• In the X-Men: The Animated Series episode "Beyond Good and Evil", Cable and his team infiltrate the evil immortal mutant Apocalypse's secret temple in Egypt. Cable notes that Apocalypse has spread death and destruction for over 5000 years. Then he notes that they found his lair after 500 centuries of research (50,000 years).

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