History Main / DickTracy

* ''TheDickTracyShow'', a 1961/62 cartoon serial loosely based on the comic strip

* ''The Dick Tracy Show'', a 1961/62 cartoon serial loosely based on the comic strip

[[redirect:ComicStrip/DickTracy]]

http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/dicktracy_8252.png
[[caption-width:300:Dick Tracy, [[DissonantSerenity contemplating the violence that he will no doubt be inflicting]].]]
One of the most well-known NewspaperComics of all time, Dick Tracy, created by Chester Gould, is about the cases of a tough as nails police detective. Inspired as a TakeThat towards organized crime in the 1930s (indeed, the strip's first major villain, [[BigBad Big Boy Caprice]], was an {{Expy}} of Al Capone) the series followed Detective Dick Tracy as he fights crime, as a modern day SherlockHolmes but with a lot of emphasis on forensic methods/police procedures and the occassional space-age gadget (most notably the character's famous two-way wrist communicators).

The strip is even more famous for its strange-looking villains, whose villainy was marked with a RedRightHand. Imagine characters with names like Flattop, Pruneface and The Brow and you'll know what they look like.

Furthermore, the strip pulled no punches with an intensity of bloody violence for its time that would impress Sam Peckinpah and QuentinTarantino. For instance, Tracy would often shoot for the head, but the villains often had a KarmicDeath; the fate of Gargles being chopped to pieces in a glass factory by falling broken pieces of sheet glass shattered in a gun battle is a good example.

However, the strip [[DorkAge went awry]] starting the 1960s with Tracy getting a spaceship called the Space Coupe and eventually going to the moon to meet the Moon People. When the series returned to Earth, with futuristic Moon people technology like ray guns and air cars that look like flying trash cans, Gould struggled to adapt the strip to modern times. Concessions included introducing a hippie sidekick for Tracy and briefly having Tracy grow a moustache; the former stuck around for nearly a decade before being killed off, the latter was forcibly shaven off within several months of it being grown. But most notably, the strip became bitter and cynical, as Gould used Tracy to condemn recent Supreme Court rulings that gave protection to criminals, which Gould (via Tracy) condemned as handcuffing police officers from beating the shit out of criminals and suspected criminals in order to force them to confess.

Finally, Gould retired in 1977 and mystery writer Max Allan Collins took over writing and did his best to restore the best of the strip's past. Silly characters like Moon Maid and the above mentioned hippie sidekick were KilledOffForReal, legacy versions of popular (and deceased) villains were introduced (and in the cases of some, like Pruneface, flashback stories were written to bring them back) and the gadgets were scaled back to a more reasonable level. In addition, he also had Tracy get his complaints about reforms to due process out of his system when he temporarily resigned from the force to become a private detective. Sadly, Collins was forced off the strip in the 1990s, leading to the series descending to being SoOkayItsAverage under succeeding writer Mike Kilian, and then going ''completely and totally insane'' when Kilian died and longtime artist Dick Locher took over the writing duties, as [[http://joshreads.com/?cat=54 some have observed]].

In 2011 Locher retired and a new team headed by writer Mike Curtis and DC/Marvel artist Joe Staton took over the strip. The restart already has fans talking of a [[GrowingTheBeard renaissance]].

The strip has been depicted with numerous media adaptations: movie serials, the 1961/1962 TV series, TheDickTracyShow, cartoons, and a full-length 1990 [[Film/DickTracy theatrical film]] starring Warren Beatty, whose specific tropes are discussed here.
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!!Tropes:
* AffectionateParody - A long-running feature in Al Capp's ''LilAbner'' is that Abner's hero is a Tracy pastiche called Fearless Fosdick.
** And there's the classic [[LooneyTunes Daffy Duck]] cartoon "The Great Piggy Bank Robbery," in which Daffy dreams he's [[DisneyAcidSequence "Duck Twacy."]]
* AndKnowingIsHalfTheBattle - The Crimestopper's Textbook in the Sunday strips
* AnyoneCanDie - Moon Maid, Groovy Grove, Model Jones, Jean Penfield, the Summer sisters, Brilliant.
** Collins once said that, since he's the main character, you know Tracy will make it out alive, but you could never be sure about ''anybody else.'' He believed this was essential for a credible sense of drama.
* AuthorExistenceFailure - Three times. Rick Fletcher, who replaced Chester Gould as artist, died in 1983, and writer Mike Kilian died in 2005. Probably the most tragic instance came in 1986 with the premature death of John Locher, who was in the process of taking over the strip's art duties from his father,
* AuthorFilibuster - Gould's rants about the restrictions of due process
* BadassLongcoat
* BaldOfEvil - The Brow
* BeautyEqualsGoodness
* BerserkButton - Junior, of all people, experienced this once. Right after his first wife is murdered (by a bomb meant for Tracy himself), the first thing he does when he finds out who was responsible is [[TookALevelInBadass take Tracy's spare gun, drive himself to their hideout and prepare to avenge his wife]]. [[spoiler: Only to chicken out at the last minute, requiring Tracy to come to the rescue.]]
* TheBlank - The Blank
* BookSafe: Flattop is hiding out in a boarding house and decides keeping his loot on his person is too risky. So, when he sees an old thick photo album under a table that looks rarely used, he decides to cut out the inner pages and hide his money in it. As it happens, the kid blackmailing Flattop has drowned while ice skating on expensive skates bought with the shakedown money. Those skates led Tracy to the boarding house where he requests the boy's mother to get a photo for the newspaper and so they go to the photo album and the money is discovered. When Tracy asks where this money came from, the mother guesses it must be from her boarder and Tracy proceeds to Flattop's room while the crook is frantically trying to escape.
* BrainUploading - Memory Banks, in one of Collins's more offbeat stories.
* ButterFace - A number of recurring female characters.
* CanonDiscontinuity - The strip's moon period of the 1960s
** Though the new team (Staton & Curtis) have been making occasional references to it in-strip - it remains to be seen if they're planning on bringing it back or if this is just a DiscontinuityNod.
* CaptainErsatz - 1970's art thief Art Dekko looks an ''awful lot'' like LupinIII. On the other hand, an anime homage way back in the 70's is pretty cool in and of itself.
* CaptainObvious - the narration box. In 2009 the narration box over a drawing of a character playing solitaire blared, "SOLITAIRE".
* CarnivalOfKillers - 'Big Boy' Caprice created one by offering a one million dollar open contract on Tracy's life.
* CartwrightCurse - Although Junior did eventually settle down with Sparkle, he had to endure the violent deaths of both his first girlfriend, Model Jones and his first wife, Moon Maid.
* CatchPhrase: Ye gods!
* TheChase - Many of the classic stories involve elaborate manhunts. The chase to catch the Brow, once he went on the run, is one of the most memorable.
* TheClan - B.O. Plenty's big, goofy, but mostly benign extended family. Also Flattop's family of crooks.
** Although Flattop's family is split. His kids and grandchild are the ones that go to crime, while his brothers and (unnamed) sister are civilians (Blowtop had to reform, though).
* CloudCuckoolander - everything about the modern strip. Seriously, just read it.
* CloningBlues - After faking his death (for the second time!), Mumbles returns years later with a shady biologist in tow, claiming to be a clone of the original Mumbles. It's all an elaborate scheme to swindle research money from Diet Smith. Tracy exposes it and Mumbles goes to jail, naturally.
* ContractOnTheHitman - Fearing the police's eventual retaliation when Big Boy Caprice offered a one million dollar open contract on Tracy's life, [[BigBadEnsemble other criminals]] offered a similar contract on the life of whoever claims the prize on Tracy's life, further discouraging people taking the contract by making it a ''bigger'' one.
* CreatorBreakdown - Gould actually thought turning a strip about an urban cop into a science fiction series on the moon was a good idea. Then again, given the sheer volume of contempt Gould had towards various 1960s Supreme Court rulings regarding due process rights all criminals have, Gould probably thought turning the book into a sci-fi strip would be better for his mental health.
** Judging by the decline of the strip's artwork quality from 2006 to 2011, some fans consider Dick Locher to have suffered one of these, most likely because he experienced both the death of both his son (John Locher, who was co-artist in the mid-80s) and one of his closest friends (Mike Kilian, who was the writer between 1992 and 2006) while working on the strip.
* CreatorCameo: Dick Locher made an appearance in his final strip as artist, thanking Tracy for "32 years of high speed excitement." Whether this counts as a heartwarming moment or egotism depends on whether you prefer to remember Locher for his good artwork until 2005, or his terrible artwork and worse writing from 2006 onwards.
* DeadMansChest - 88 Keys hides a corpse in his grand piano.
** A tree surgeon, after committing murder, hides the body inside a tree trunk that had been split by weather. The tree heals around it and the body goes undiscovered until the tree is cut down, decades later, when the murderer is an old man.
* {{Deathtrap}} - Only Tracy often needed rescue to fully escape them
* EveryoneKnowsMorse - Tracy escapes from Flattop by tapping out Morse code with his foot to communicate with the WAC-in-training living in the apartment below.
* TheFaceless - Spots
* FamilyUnfriendlyDeath - People regularly die in perverse (and graphic) ways, such as getting run over by a steamroller, or having [[EyeScream their eyes gouged out]]. And this is all printed on the comics page.
** Better yet, the steamroller death took place on Christmas Day, and ''in the same frame'' the writers wished their readers "Happy Holidays from Dick and the gang!"
** Gould himself said that the worst death of all went to The Brow, who was impaled on a flagpole so hard that he went [[NightmareFuel ALL THE WAY DOWN TO THE GROUND]].
* [[{{Fiction500}} Fiction 500]] - Diet Smith
* ForgottenPhlebotinum - Most of the Moon Period technology was never mentioned again after Moon Maid's death.
* FreakyFashionMildMind
* GadgetWatches
* GoshHornet - In the early 60's, [[CompleteMonster Spots]] and his [[EvilMinions minion]] [[IneffectualSympatheticVillain Ogden]] get trapped by a swarm of bees.
* GrumpyOldMan - B.O. Plenty
* HairOfGold - Sparkle Plenty
* HesBack - Pat Patton, who had been written out of the strip by Dick Locher, made his return within days of Mike Curtis and Joe Staton taking over.
* HeartwarmingOrphan - Junior
* [[AmericanAccents Hillbilly Accent]] - B.O. Plenty
* HitmanWithAHeart - The Iceman, who falls for Sparkle Plenty. He dies a KarmicDeath, but does a minor HeelFaceTurn at the last minute, for her sake.
* {{Hobos}} - Steve the Tramp was a murderous hobo.
* HookHand - The Claw from ''Dick Tracy's Dilemma''.
* HotAmazon - Lizz
* HumanPopsicle - In the Collins years, we learn the Nazis froze Pruneface. He gets revived only to die all over again.
* HumongousMecha - [[http://joshreads.com/?p=1711 TRAZE-R, the giant robot Dick Tracy]].
* TheHyena - 'Laffy' Smith
* ImprobableHairstyle - Crewy Lou, although all the characters do think it looks odd.
* InTheBlood - Flattop's big extended family, though some of them reform.
* InformedJudaism - Dick's partner Sam Catchem was introduced as a Jewish guy, which was pretty progressive for the 1940's. It rarely has any bearing on the storylines, though, and so isn't mentioned much.
* KarmicDeath: The main villain of most recent storylines suffer one, usually of the [[CruelAndUnusualDeath "Cruel & Unusual"]] variety.
* KeepCirculatingTheTapes: Sadly, collections of the various Dick Tracy comic strips are few in number and those few that DO exist, largely focus on the early 1930s era. In particular, Max Collins' critically acclaimed run on the strip has only had three printed volumes, though some of his strips appeared in other collections.
** Since 2006, IDW has been publishing the "Complete Chester Gould's Dick Tracy". Twelve volumes (covering the start of the strip in 1931 to March 1950) have been released.
* KidSidekick - Junior
* LanternJawOfJustice - One of Tracy's distinguishing features, to the point where Warren Beatty took heavy criticism for refusing to wear the prosthetic makeup to give him Tracy's profile in the 90s film.
** Of course, other accounts state that Beatty wanted to wear the makeup, but the studio wouldn't let him cover up his famous mug.
* LargeHam - Aged thespian Vitamin Flintheart is a good guy and one of Dick's best friends, but his charm comes from being an ''enormous'' ham.
* LegacyCharacter - Flattop. Not only do we have his father (Poptop), his siblings (Sharptop, Blowtop and an unnamed sister) and his KIDS (Flattop Jr. and Angeltop) but now we have his freaking GRANDSON (Hi-Top).
* MagicPlasticSurgery - Dr. Carver, plastic surgeon to the underworld.
* MasterOfDisguise - Puttypuss
* MeaningfulName - Pretty much everybody. However, a few minor characters who got promoted to series regulars wound up permanently stuck with names that only related to the plotline which introduced them. Poor Vitamin Flintheart!
* [[MixedMarriage Mixed Couple]] - Dick's daughter Bonnie's boyfriend is Detective Joe Sampson, who is Native American (Yakima, specifically). Dick's younger son Joe is named after him, incidentally.
** And Junior married a space alien, but well, [[CanonDisContinuity we don't talk about that.]] Alas, [[DroppedABridgeOnHim poor Moon Maid...]]
* MoneyDearBoy - Whenever the intros to the Dick Tracy books and articles regarding Tracy talk about Chester Gould, they tend to point out that Chet did not see himself as an artist creating a fictional narrative to entertain audiences, but rather as a businessman creating a product designed to sell newspapers.
* NiceHat - The ol' yellow fedora.
* TheNondescript
* OfficialCouple - Dick and Tess had a very, very long engagement. When they finally announced one day that they had just eloped, the entire cast was stunned.
* OffModel - The strip's artwork tended to veer into this in Gould's later years, although given that he was prone to experimentation in this period, some of it may have been a conscious choice on his part. Played ''very'' straight with Dick Locher's work from 2006 to 2009; Jim Brozman's efforts between 2009 and 2011 were a bit better, but not by a whole lot.
* PapaWolf - Tracy, when Crewy Lou kidnaps his infant daughter.
* PlagueMaster - Captain Cure
* PluckyComicRelief - Vitamin Flintheart, B.O.Plenty
* PoliceProcedural
* PornStache - Tracy sported one of these for a while in the '70s. Eventually, his coworkers physically hold him down and shave the ridiculous thing off. His response afterward is, "Thanks."
* PragmaticAdaptation: The handling of the non-gangster villains in media adaptations. In the case of Nazi spy Pruneface, he was turned into a simple mob boss. The Blank, in the Dick Tracy movie, didn't fair as well: the Blank became a disguise for Breathless Mahoney, who wore a man's suit, a flesh colored stocking over her head, and talked like a guy, and basically started killing off Dick Tracy's various enemies to take over the criminal underworld (so that Dick could have time to marry Breathless, if he had no bad guys to arrest).
* PrettyInMink - A few rich ladies would wear fur.
* RedRightHand - Most of the strip's most famous villains were grotesque in some fashion (Flattop, Pruneface, the Brow, etc.).
* RevengeBeforeReason - Big Boy's open contract on Tracy, which even his fellow gangsters say is crazy.
** Similarly the Blank's murder spree; all because he was driven to madness over being rejected by his former friends due to his disfigurement.
* ScareCampaign - The story arc about music/movie piracy as not only [[{{Anvilicious}} ham-handed]], [[DidNotDoTheResearch factually incorrect/out of touch]] on most counts, and like much of the strip in recent years [[{{Cloudcuckoolander}} utterly bugnuts]], it also included dire warnings about downloading, comparing it to buying drugs, and had [=PSAs=] warning parents they could suffer the consequences for their children downloading [=MP3s=], complete with an image of police car with sirens blaring zooming at top speed toward a suburban home.
** Considering the fact that a woman in the US was just fined ''over a million dollars'' on appeal for sharing copyrighted music, the ScareCampaign may not be as far-fetched as some might think.
** Far fetched? That is what the people RIAA and MPAA actually think is what happens, and it isn't strict enough.
* ScrewThisImOuttaHere - Played for laughs in one of Max Allan Collins' earlier stories. After listening to two rival villains talking at length about why they want revenge on one another, Tracy suddenly starts to leave the building, saying that their dispute has nothing to do with the police and that they can sort it out themselves. The villains are taken aback, as they had both hoped to get Tracy to arrest and/or kill the other one, and try to persuade him to stay. It then turns out that what Tracy was ''actually'' doing was trying to distract them so that Sam and Liz could sneak up and knock them out -- which the crooks don't discover until after they come around and find themselves cuffed.
* SideKick - Sam Catchem (originally Pat Patton, before Pat got promoted).
* StreetUrchin - Junior, before his adoption by Tracy.
* TechMarchesOn - While some of the extreme examples like the Space Coupe with its magnetic propulsion system are straight examples, Tracy's various wrist communicators have always felt reasonably in line with the times with occasional upgrades over the years.
* ThoseWackyNazis - Pruneface and the Brow
* ThrowingOffTheDisability - The Mayor's invalid wife rises from her bed to shoot Mrs Pruneface and save her daughters.
* TrainEscape - Shakey does it to lose the pursuing Tracy in his climatic attempt to escape.
* TunnelKing - The Mole
* TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture - Even before it got ridiculous with the space period and after it pulled back, Dick Tracy has an ample supply of futuristic gadgets, especially with his various wrist communicators.
* TwoFaced - Haf-and-Haf
* UglyGuysHotDaughter - How did B.O. Plenty and Gravel Gertie produce a child who looks like Sparkle?
* UglyGuyHotWife - Subverted with Pruneface and Mrs. Pruneface.
* TheUnintelligible - Mumbles and later Merky.
* TheVamp - Breathless Mahoney.
* VaporTrail - Happens to Measles
* VideoPhone - Dick's "2-Way Wrist TV" that carries this function and is used to communicate with police headquarters.
* WeNeedToGetProof - In the NES Dick Tracy, Dick needs to gather a significant amount of evidence before confronting the villains.
* WhereDoesHeGetAllThoseWonderfulToys - From Diet Smith Enterprises, mostly. Tracy met Diet when a crook tried to steal the plans to Diet's wrist radio. Diet has supplied the police with nifty gadgets ever since.
* WhipItGood - Mrs Pruneface
* WhiteHairedPrettyGirl - Gravel Gertie may be crone-like, but it's universally conceded in-universe that she has lovely flowing white hair (as well as an angelic voice).
** So much that, before first laying eyes on her [[CompleteMonster The Brow]] was completely smitten with her (he had been blinded).
* WildHair - B.O. Plenty. Also Junior, well into his adulthood, but he did eventually start combing it.
* WorthyOpponent - I think Big Boy Caprice admits this much of Tracy at the end of the NES game.
* WouldHitAGirl - well, Dick would hit a homicidal female as large as himself, anyway.

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* AffectionateParody - A long-running feature in Al Capp's ''[[{{ptitle6p8e221c}} Li'l Abner]]'' is that Abner's hero is a Tracy pastiche called Fearless Fosdick.

** Collins once said that, since he's the main character, you know Tracy will make it out alive, but you could never be sure about ''anybody else.''