Deadly! is a 6-issue Australian horror novel series aimed at preteen readers published in the year 2000 by Paul Jennings and Morris Gleitzman. It is a Spiritual Successor to their earlier collaboration work; Wicked!
The book series revolves around two teenagers; a boy named Sprocket and a girl named Amy, who become caught up in a web of intrigue surrounding a strange blue seed that compels humans to eat it, the mysterious disappearance of Amy's parents and the abandonment of a baby Amy believes to be her illegitimate half-sister, Sprocket's amnesia, and a group of strange six-year-olds who talk and act far more mature than they have any right to.
Like Wicked!, Deadly! received an Animated Adaptation, though this one was only 13 episodes long to Wicked's 26.
This series includes examples of:
- Animated Adaptation: A 13-episode one.
- Balloon Belly: Whoever consumes one of the blue tea seeds finds their stomach bloats up with massive amounts of gas, distending into a pregnant-looking swell before the seed... uh... passes.
- Cain and Abel: The Brats are actually Sprocket's older brothers and sisters. This doesn't stop them from hunting him down and even threatening to kill him if he won't give up the secret for making a new supply of blue tea, a secret he doesn't even know due to his amnesia.
- Fantastic Flora: The blue seeds. They smell absolutely delicious to humans, who are compelled to eat them. If they give in to the compulsion, their stomachs bloat up with blue gas until they look pregnant, whereupon they eventually poop/fart out the seed. And if the seed is germinated by planting it in frozen ground/snow, it grows into a plant whose leaves can create a blue tea that reverses the age of the drinker.
- Fountain of Youth: The blue seeds that the Brats are looking for can, if successfully germinated, be turned into a tea that physically de-ages the drinker, offering the potential of eternal youth.
- Pet the Dog: The first hint that the Brats aren't all evil, just desperate and being driven by the most vicious of their number, is when one of them sacrifices some of their last dwindling reserves of blue tea to de-age his beloved pet dog back to a puppy, even as his siblings chastise him that their own lives are running out.
- Mistaken for Pregnant: Dawn's first encounter with Sprocket in the books is whilst he has a gas-bloated stomach from eating one of the blue tea seeds. Combined with the fact he woke up amnesiac on a nudist beach and stole the first set of clothing he could find, which is a dress, she thinks he's "the roughest looking pregnant woman" that she's ever seen. It even goes so far that when he starts writhing in pain as the seed gets ready to be expelled, she thinks he's gone into labor and starts trying to help him with the apparent impending delivery, even patting his belly and pointing out that "she" can't give birth with "her" dress on. Sprocket's embarrassment is almost worse than the gut-ache before the seed finally comes out.
- Naked People Are Funny: Sprocket regains consciousness on a nudist beach, and has to try and find a way to get out of there and get some clothes. He notes with considerable mortification that the people on the beach are very much not the kind of people the average person wants to picture naked.
- The End... Or Is It?: Whilst the novels end with the one truly evil member of the Brats frozen in ice, the cartoon ends with him reverted to his true significantly old age and left behind by his kin, who have accepted their approaching demise and chosen to spend it together as a family. Just before the episode ends, he spots an unnoticed seed has fallen into some snow and sprouted, and he chuckles sinisterly, noting that he can be young again before his eyes glow an eerie blue, making it clear he will use the blue tea — and now he can grow as much as he wants.
- Toilet Humor: The series revolves heavily around farts and poop to provide comedic relief in the face of the sinister mystery.
- Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: The series' antagonists, known to Amy and Sprocket as "The Brats", are a group of six year old kids who talk and act like fully mature adults, and are even capable of such grown-up feats as successfully driving a car and wielding guns. It turns out it's because the Brats are actually over a hundred years old apiece, they just revert back to physical childhood with the blue tea.
- The Reveal: Given the series is essentially a long, sprawling mystery, it'd be easier to say what isn't revealed in the final novel.
- The fundamental nature of the blue seeds as the Fountain of Youth and the Brats as the family who discovered them nearly a century ago.
- Amy's "baby sister" is actually her mother, deaged to a baby after drinking blue tea.
- Sprocket is actually related to the brats, (and his real name isn't Sprocket).
- Who Wants to Live Forever?: The father and mother of the Brats chose to give up immortality and die of old age, believing that living forever was simply not good for the human mind. This was also why they refused to tell their children how to germinate the blue tea seeds, for fear they wouldn't accept this wisdom.
