Darth Wiki / Tommy Munroe

In an alternate nineties setting, 10-year-old Tommy Munroe leads a normal life in his suburban neighborhood, until he is possessed by a powerful alien warrior that makes him into a one-man Super Sentai team, and now he has to fight the alien warrior's evil brother, Thraxaru, who's trying to pry Tommy's powers out of his body with physical and mental attacks, including monsters made out of everyday items and drawings made by children! This is not an easy task, seeing as how he also has to deal with his teenage sister, Katie, his goofy parents, Karen and Laurence, and the problems of suburban life.

Possible rating: TV-G or TV-PG. Not your average child and family in a sitcom; they state outright that they're Christians, though they often lampshade The Bible. Every character has validity and depth, adults are not useless, and no matter what devastating monster attack comes their way, they're still a loving, happy family.

In this show, No Celebrities Were Harmed, only combined, and X Meets Y abounds, especially on television. For example:

• DigiSpheroids: Your not-so-standard Nineties Adventure Series in Cyberspace... with puppets. Tommy's second-favorite show in the universe, also known as his backup just in case PowerBorgs isn't coming back.

• PowerBorgs: Obviously everything awesome for a 90's kid combined, and subsequently Tommy's favorite show in the history of the universe.
• Thunderdragons: A British Stop Motion show; Tommy's sister, Karen, loves this show and its handsome puppet protagonist, Julian Gryth. Needless to say, Tommy himself won't touch the show.

Tropes

General

• Art Initiates Life: Many of Thraxaru's monsters are half-this, and half-everyday-object, usually.
• Big Brother Instinct: Age-inverted. Tommy feels that as the more powerful of any of his family, he has the strongest duty to protect them from harm.
  • Knight Templar Big Brother: If Katie gains enough damage from a monster's attack, the gloves come off and someone's gonna pay.
    • If it's Katie that's the protective one, her attacks will be fairly effective against any monster, even a giant.
• Brand X: There's no such thing as Windows or Mac, they're combined to form Zeus and its line of programs such as Wordpad Wordsworth, MSPaint Art IE, and so on.
  • If there are two popular brands of anything (cereal, video game consoles, etc.), they'll be combined, with some tweakage.
• Child Mage/Child Soldier: Tommy, precociously talented in the art of combat, intrigue, and deadly energy attacks.
• Cool Big Sis: Katie, although Tommy would never admit it.
• Favouritism Flip-Flop: Tommy will not touch anything that is a favorite of his sister's, except when she either doesn't like it anymore, or simply isn't looking.
• I Was Quite a Looker: Although Laurence now is a middle-aged funny fat guy, back then he was quite... different... leading to a Heroic BSoD for Tommy when Katie notices he looked like Julian Gryth. Julian "Thunderdragons" Gryth.
• The Knights Who Say "Squee!": Tommy once had to save the PowerBorgs actors lives from destruction while he was on the set of their new movie. You can imagine his enthusiasm, even though as an alien hero he can't necessarily stop for an autograph.
• My Nayme Is: Thraxaru is pronounced "Thraxar", the U is silent.
• Puppeteer Parasite: A more-or-less benevolent version, as it allows for his powers, although Tommy as a good Christian kid does has his worries about allowing an alien monster (analogous to a demon) to live on within him.
• Sibling Yin-Yang: Katie and Tommy, although Katie thinks Tommy forces it.
• Suck E. Cheese's: Planet Party-plex, a mix between awesome and creepy; complete with advanced animatronic aliens that adapt to almost any instrument.

PowerBorgs specific

• Cyborg: The PowerBorgs are superhumanoid machines when transformed, and ordinary teens otherwise. How they turn from ordinary organisms to Mechanical Lifeforms isn't quite explained in the series (The BorgAura/Borg-Power did it!). In the Japanese series it was based off of, they were cyborgs all along, and just got nifty costumes so they can look cool and fly around and stuff; everything else is just their... cyborgness.
  • However, what the teens do have that separates them from other people is one stock superpower for each of them (I.E. one has Spider-Sense, the other has Aura Vision, and so on); nothing really cyborg-like, unless you think like the American writers who thought robots could do anything.
• Dance Battler: Scotty of the PowerBorgs, the Captain Ersatz of Zack, incorporates popular (for the nineties) dance moves into his kung-fu techniques in a form which he calls "Scotty-Time", which he uses in either human or Borg form.
  • His Japanese counterpart is justified for his dancing by being trained in Capoeira, which was not understood by the American writers.
• Dawson Casting: Brainiac of the PowerBorgs, the Captain Ersatz of Billy and an Expy of Brains, is actually an adult, although his baby-face says otherwise. For Brainiac's flash-forward pilot story, his older, nearly identical brother had to play him, for he looks the age that his younger brother is supposed to be.

Thunderdragons specific

• Alien Sky: Jryn Alpha's sky features a tiny blue sapphire sun. Even though the creator knew that a blue sun of any kind would be too hot/unstable to allow complex life to develop ^note Even if the planet was far enough away from the sun in question to maintain a proper, Earthlike temperature, its heat would eventually cause the sun to burn out much faster than a "proper" yellow sun., he deliberately broke the rules to show that Jryn Alpha was indeed a different world.
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": Averted in Thunderdragons, where many of the animals are definitely not like anything in our world, although they might use familiar terms associated with our animals, such as "puppy", "roach", and "lamb".
  • There are the Canequinuks, however, who resemble a part Chihuahua part Afghan Hound part horse creature (Canine + Equinine), and are most stupid. Still, they are the brainlessly loyal pack animals of Jryn Alpha, and shouldn't be taken for granted.
• Genre Shift: Thunderdragons, going from rescuing the people and animals of Jryn Alpha to stopping intergalactic terror after just 40 episodes. ^? There were 52 20-minute episodes.
• Gonk: ^Arl Scientist and engineer Krunax Jranus looks this way compared to the rest of the generically handsome cast. Take a look at him, and then try imagining him partnered with a character that looks more like this◊.
  • It was due to Krunax's Non-Standard Character Design that he was soon Killed Off for Real through Heroic Sacrifice, and replaced with another, older, but still handsome, Arl for Julian. ^=[ A writer apparently wasn't too happy with how some critics were treating Krunax, some of them saying that he should be removed. He bets that they're rather sorry now that they made him do it! He made a couple cameo appearances afterward as a Spirit Advisor and star of his first test film respectively.
• Hold Your Hippogriffs: Thunderdragons... If it's a British slang phrase, it has a Jrynian equivalent.
  "I say, that's just not cricket saccharine!" (Also acting as the opposite of "That's so sweet!")
  "Bloody hell Scorchin' star!" (You have to trill the R's to get maximum effect)
  "Luvaduck Lorvolammie!" (From a forgotten Jrynian language; the phrase roughly translates to "Heavens above, strike down my manhood if what I see is really what I see." according to the writer of the Thunderdragons series)
  • Also, "hold your horses" becomes "curb your Canequinuks", with the latter having much more of an offensive effect, equivalent to "Hold your horses, you stupid, impatient whelp!"
• Schizo Tech: Thunderdragons, having a strong ring of MiddlePunk, although the highest level of technology in the setting was a prototype film projector made by Krunax; he deemed that The World Is Not Ready for such a bizarre device.

DigiSpheroids specific

• Everyone Is a Super: All fauna in the Digiverse has immense power, or the potential for such.
• Intrigued by Humanity/Humanity Is Infectious
• Knowledge Broker: The Tree of Knowledge, a creature unfortunately grafted to a tree who absorbs the knowledge around the Digiverse through his roots, acts as this to anyone who wants information, but mostly to the Posi-Team and their human friends.
• New Powers as the Plot Demands: The DigiSpheroids, never having a set list of powers, just loose guidelines. This can get rather silly when "able to generate mini-tornadoes" becomes "able to effectively cause a massive hurricane"! All this from a doll-sized critter...
• Not So Stoic/Defrosting Ice King: CyRobo, at first a hyper-intelligent robot mainly used as a fighting encyclopedia on legs, now developing very human-like personality traits through The Power of Friendship. He at first was not quite keen on developing human emotions, due to his fear that his immense power would go out of control from irrational motivation; however, he soon realized that emotional power could unlock his true abilities, and he soon embraced his human self, becoming the most powerful D-Sphere in the Digiverse, next to the demigod-like Fae and Darque.
• Powers as Programs: Literally for the digital DigiSpheroids; their code can be modified to make them
  • evolve quickly and/or boost its Power Levels in emergency situations,
  • change their Elemental Powers, or...
  • corrupt their data to horrific levels.
• Power Trio: AvAaron, CyRobo, and RollRaviq.
• Technopath: The main antagonists of DigiSpheroids, Reginald and Quincy Wickwire, became expert technopaths after a Freak Lab Accident graphed binary numbers onto their skin. However, should they grow annoyed and enraged, they become instant Walking Techbane.