Don't Eat The Neighbours was a joint British-Canadian puppet show (with some CGI as well) which aired on CITV between 2001 and 2002.
The series focused on the antics of two neighbouring households in a forest somewhere in England. One is home to Rabbit, his daughter Lucy and twin babies Peter and Emily. Next door lives Wolf, who has been banished from Canada, and his sons, Barry and Simon.
Rabbit regularly carries out raids on the cabbage patch of a local Bear, with the help of his friend Terrapin. Wolf regularly attempts to catch and eat Rabbit, together with Rabbit's other main foe, the camp and cunning Fox. Despite what their parents get up to, Lucy, Barry and Simon are on reasonably good terms, something which their parents frown on.
Tropes
- Big "NO!": Rabbit in one episode, after realizing that he has lost a bet he made earlier with Wolf and has to wear 'I Love Wolves' clothes.
- A Dog Named "Dog": The main adult characters are simply named after their species. When Wolf is briefly convinced he's no longer allowed to call himself a wolf, he realizes he'll have to change his name to something normal like "Steve".
- Dreadful Musician: Lucy when she starts to play the trumpet. At the end of the episode, it turns out her grandmother, whom Rabbit had encouraged her to follow but had never heard play, was also one of these.
- Fantasy Sequence: Wolf has a rather bizarre one during one episode where the neighbourhood is suffering from a drought.
- Gentle Giant: Bear is a polite and affable fellow, but everyone besides Lucy are too terrified of his size to appreciate his hospitality.
- Hoist by Their Own Petard: Wolf and Fox have fallen victim to their own traps on quite a few occasions.
- Lovable Coward: Terrapin.
- Market-Based Title: Known by the name Big Teeth, Bad Breath in Canada.
- Medium Blending: CGI is used to supplement things that would be hard to pull off with the puppets, such as distant shots showing the characters' entire bodies. Depending on the set, sometimes the CGI models are simply overlaid onto the sets and even on screen with puppet actors, or sometimes the entire shot, characters and scenery, are composed with CGI.
- Missing Mom: Lucy's mother was eaten by a wolf, while Barry and Simon's mother left their father for another wolf.
- Mistaken For An Alien: At the end of one episode where a series of misunderstandings leads to the neighbourhood believing aliens are invading, Fox, who had been suspended for most of the episode after getting caught in his own gas/rope trap and still wearing a protective suit, ends up having to flee from a mob led by Terrapin.
- No Flow in CGI: Just about the only flowy aspect to any of the puppets are the ears on the rabbits, giving the impression that the puppet designs were optimized with being easy to render accurately in CG in mind.
- Real After All: In the Christmas Episode, Lucy is depressed after not getting the bike she wanted from Old Father Rabbit. The next night, the various adult members of the cast end up climbing onto the roof, each claiming to her to be Old Father Rabbit and each with the bike she requested. At the end of it all, Rabbit and Lucy find that there are seven bikes, when there were only six up on the roof. They find a note attached to the seventh from Old Father Rabbit, apologizing for it being a day late due to him and his elves painting it multi-coloured.
- Recap Episode: The final episode with both Terrapin and Wolf sulking by themselves, fed up with how their friends have treated them throughout the series.
- Shout-Out: The species represented in the series are those of the main characters in the "Br'er Rabbit" stories.
- Trademark Favorite Food: Pizza for the wolves, seeing as Wolf can't catch anything.
- The Voiceless: Peter and Emily. Justified seeing as they are babies.
- We Need a Distraction: In the first episode, to steal the bait from Wolf and Fox's trap, Rabbit sends Terrapin to Wolf's house in a casserole dish with instructions to do this.
- Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: In the first episode, Rabbit confides to Terrapin that he has a deep fear of wolves, and it's fortunate that he lives in Britain where there are no wolves. Unfortunately, a family of wolves move in next door from Canada later that day.
