"I've lived my whole life on Normal Street. It has a lake at one end and a forest of shady trees at the other. But what lies in between is anything but normal."
— Gortimer Gibbon's foreword before each episode (excluding the pilot)
Gortimer Gibbon's Life on Normal Street is a 2015 Prime Video original series created by David Anaxagoras. It follows the eponymous Gortimer Gibbon (Sloane Morgan Siegel), his two best friends Melody "Mel" Fuller (Ashley Boettcher) and Ranger Bowen (Drew Justice) and their many zany misadventures on Normal Street — an ordinary-looking suburb that's not so ordinary beneath the surface.
The series is heavily based on Magic Realism. Weird things happen on Normal Street all the time and no one bats an eye. Episodes are usually standalone, and plots range from the more realistic (i.e. a quest to find a rare flower) to the downright absurd (i.e. time travel, cloning, interdimensional transporters, superheroes). Just go with it.
Gortimer vs. the Tropes:
- Alliterative Name: Gortimer Gibbon
- Can't Live with Them, Can't Live Without Them: Ironically, despite spending the episode trying to kill him, Ms. Hudspith doesn't hesitate to call Gortimer to save the Frog from the flooding crawlspace, and once he informs her its gone, they end up finding her at the Wishing Well trying to call it back with the same ring.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: In the emotional climax of "Mel vs. the Future", Mel contemplates whether or not to travel into to the future with her adult self in order to find a way to bring her mom back in adult Mel's lab. Gortimer, Ranger and her dad show up at the scene to try and talk her out of it. Even though she'd be leaving her friends and family behind, Mel just wants the life she currently knows to end. The scene feels awfully reminiscent of talking someone out of committing suicide, as Mel travelling into the future would technically be her "leaving this world to make everything better". Hmmm...
- Expy: White Hat is obviously one of similarly campy 60s superheroes like 1966 Batman.
- Genie in a Bottle: Well, Frog in the Well, but this is what the Frog of Ultimate Doom essentially is; it will grant your wish in exchange for throwing something down the Wishing Well. According to Ranger's Legend, a farmer's kid brought an early summer by the Frog tricking him into giving his finger to it, and Ms. Hudspith gained fame and stardom when she dropped her ring in the wishing well.
- Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: "Gortimer/Mel/Rangernote and/vs. the _______".
- The Jinx: Stanley Zielinsky, introduced in "Gortimer vs. the Mobile of Misfortune", introduced as someone who "can lose the coin toss with a two-headed coin" and whose bad luck can affect the people around him. It's later revealed he became this due to using the Mobile of Misfortune to help his mom with getting a job. This ultimately transfers onto Gortimer when he uses the Mobile to give him good luck, and ultimately loses this when Mel fixes the Mobile.
- Motive Misidentification: Ms. Hudspith ends up being wrong about why the Frog occasionally returns to her house. Rather than punishing her for rejecting it during the height of her career, its trying to get her to love him again by coming back and recreating the day they met, including the heat wave.
- Pop-Culture Pun Episode Title: "Gortimer vs. The Fault in Our Street" is a pun based on The Fault in Our Stars.
- Teen Genius: Mel is capable of building robots and time machines even though she's a middle schooler.
- Winds of Destiny, Change!: The titular Mobile of Misfortune, which allows someone to manipulate luck, usually in the form of making someone lucky and someone else unlucky. According to Ranger, it was invented by Mr. Perez after being jealous of how lucky his neighbor, Mr. Lee was. He was able to use it to take some of Lee's luck, only for him to lose his house with Lee's when it caught fire from Lee's house suffering from a grease fire, with the only thing remaining being the Mobile.
- World of Weirdness: Despite the show's main setting, ironically being called "Normal Street", life on the street is never normal, or boring for that matter. Strange and supernatural things happen on a regular basis, and most of the characters are pretty much adjusted to it. Season 1 alone has a wish-granting frog, a "mobile" that controls a person's luck, a pencil that erases a person's memory of a certain topic, a mysterious van that whose driver can silence anymore, a mystical gavel that turns all of its users' followers into yes-men, and a mysterious fortune teller game that seems to have a mind of its own, among other things. Then, the latter part includes cloning, time travel, superheroes, etc.
