The Grim Adventures Of Billy And Mandy / Tropes S to Z

The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy Trope Examples
A - D | E - H | I - M | N - R | S - Z

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S

• Sadist Show: What else can you call a show where the Grim Reaper is the nicest of the main characters?
• Sanity Slippage: Happens quite a few times, but one of the most notable is when Mindy loses her cheerleader position. This stirs up the B plot of the respective episode, making Mindy attempt to hinder, incapacitate, and even kill Mandy to get her position back.
• Sassy Black Woman: Irwin's Grandmama, Tanya.
• Saving Christmas: "Billy & Mandy Save Christmas"
• Scare Dare: An abandoned house. It's just some old lady living alone. Well, OK, she is also a ghost.
• School Clubs Are Serious Business: There was an episode where the students joined school clubs. Mandy joined the Secret Snake Club, who believes in a snake-god that will eat all of the cool kids. Billy joined the Secret Service club, and discovers the knitting club is being used as a criminal front.
• The Scottish Trope (saying "Lord Moldybutt")
  • Hilariously enough, not even Lord Moldybutt himself is immune to this.
• Seadog Peg Leg: Parodied in the episode "Billy Ocean" with Captain Deadwood, a Captain Ahab Expy who had replaced his entire body with wood.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: Some episodes deal with evil or dangerous beings being released from their imprisonment, frequently but not always because of Billy's stupidity.
  • "Aren't You Chupacabra to See Me?" had Billy buy an underworld videotape containing a chupacabra that would be freed from the video to feed on blood once the video was played.
  • "Pandora's Lunch Box" played with the legend of Pandora's box and had Pandora trick Mandy into opening her lunch box to unleash all the chaos and evil sealed within it. In the end, Mandy reseals the malevolent spirits back into the box along with Pandora.
  • "The Show That Dare Not Speak Its Name" had Billy scramble an enchanted puzzle cube, setting free a Captain Ersatz of Pinhead called Pinface.
  • In Wrath of the Spider Queen, Jeff's anger is revealed to be caused from being possessed by Arachnotaur, the Spider God of Anger, who was imprisoned in a carton of chocolate milk until Billy freed him by opening the carton.
• Second-Person Attack:
  • "Chicken Ball Z" begins with Mandy repeatedly punching Billy in the face at a karate dojo, portrayed this way.
  • Towards the end of the episode "Sister Grim", the giant nun (formed by many regular sized nuns) sends Grim home with a big punch after they find out that he wasn't actually a nun the whole time.
  • At the end of the episode "Hoss Delgado: Spectral Exterminator", Hoss fights a werewolf. They jump up, and the camera pans, Matrix-style, to (almost) the POV of the werewolf. Hoss fires his slime gun at the werewolf, filling the screen to a fade-to-black.
• Series Continuity Error: The series tends to have loose continuity, but one particularly glaring continuity error is in "Waking Nightmare", where a gag involves Grim farting as he sits down and initially thinking the noise to be a whoopie cushion, when the earlier episode "Duck!" had Grim make it perfectly clear that he is incapable of flatulence.
• Severely Specialized Store: One episode shows a store at the mall called Sock Barn, which sells only socks. The reason why the characters were there, however, is because Billy eats socks.
• Shipper on Deck: Grim has teasingly shipped Billy and Mandy on occasion.
  • He refers to Mandy as Billy’s girlfriend in the episode “Opposite Day”. Billy is quick to respond She Is Not My Girlfriend.
  • In "Love is Evol Spelled Backwards”, he makes a paper doll chain of two, one with Billy’s name written on it, and the other Mandy’s.
  • In “Which Came First?”, after Billy’s been taken by giant mutant chickens…
    Grim: That’s it. We’re outta here!
    Mandy: Unfortunately, we can’t leave him.
    Grim: Awwwww. I knew you two were sweethearts. (makes kissy noises)
  • In "The Bubble with Billy", he tries to get Mandy to flirt with Billy to get him to cough up the supernatural gum he swallowed.
• Ship Tease: The topic of Billy and Mandy getting married seems to come up often. In one episode, he even kissed her.
  • When Mandy finds out that Billy fell in love with a seemingly normal girl. Cue a shocked expression, a slightly saddened expression, then a total verbal beatdown of how desperate the girl is. If it were anyone else other than Mandy, one would call her jealous.
  • Whenever Irwin tries to kiss her or woo her she either gags and literally throws up or gets angry and punches him. When it is suggested in one episode that Mandy use her feminine wiles on Billy, she's not really that against it and she didn't gag or throw-up. In fact, she moaned and got a little annoyed but compared to her normally extreme reactions-especially when Irwin is involved-this was nothing.
  • In "The Show That Dare Not Speak Its Name", Pinface at one point refers to Billy as Mandy’s “boyfriend”, and unlike in the episode "Opposite Day" (where Billy was quick to say “She Is Not My Girlfriend”), neither of them outwardly deny it.
  • In the court scene in "Keeper of the Reaper" the judge mistakes the trial for a wedding and asks Billy if he wants to take Mandy as his lawfully wedded wife, to which he happily outbursts "I do!" The judge catches on to what's really going on before he can ask Mandy, though.
  • In Spidermandy Pud’n assumes that if Billy is Jeff’s father Mandy must be his mother.
• Shot at Dawn: In one of the darkest jokes in the series (which is saying a lot), this is heavily implied to happen to Billy at the end of "Guess What's Coming to Dinner" after he attempts to escape the military school he's been enlisted in.
• Sickeningly Sweet: The Happy Huggy Stuffy Bears and Enchanted Forest from "The Crass Unicorn" are In-Universe examples of this trope. They get disgusted reactions from Mandy and Grim.
• Side Effects Include...: In "Nergal's Pizza", Nergal tells Jr. to spike Granny Grim's pizza sauce with some "horrible ghastly elixir". When Jr. asks what it does, Nergal responds "I don't know, but it's ghastly."
• The Singing Mute: King Cobra in the Secret Snake Club never talks on his own. The only time when he ever hear his voice (aside from when he gives out pained grunts when "P.E." is ever mentioned) is when he sings the tale of Shnisissugah with his guitar and harmonica.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism: The show is more cynical than your typical kids show. However, there is a fair amount of idealism still left in this series.
• Sliding Scale of Realistic vs. Fantastic: Way down on the surreal end, especially later on.
• Smart Jerk and Nice Moron: Billy is a total idiot who only seems to have hard feelings towards the bully Sperg and his son Jeff (who is a spider). His best friend Mandy, however, is a straight-A (or rather, "A+++++++") student, who hates just about everyone else, and finds the idea of having a crush on someone to be repulsive.
• Snap Back: With gusto. A good third of the episodes end with characters dead.
• Soap Within a Show: Grim's favorite show My Troubled Pony.
• Sociopathic Hero: Mandy and Grim.
• Speak of the Devil: Lord Moldybutt. If you say his name, something breaks nearby, whether it be a tree falling, or a door knob falling out. It doesn't matter who's affected by it, (because once, a tree falls on him) it will happen.
• Spider People: The title character of the episode "The Wrath of the Spider Queen", Velma Green.
• Spoof Aesop: In one episode dealing with Billy's fear of clowns, he learns from his inner frat boy that just because someone is different from you, doesn't mean you should be afraid of them. Instead, you should be angry at them! How dare they be different!
• Spotting the Thread: When Nergal Jr. tries to impersonate Mandy he screws it up by smiling, something she would never do, and Billy picks up on it immediately. No one seems to notice that Mandy suddenly got glasses for no apparent reason, though.
• Squashed Flat: In Billy and Mandy's Big Boogey Adventure, the villains' boat gets flattened vertically in one scene, and then falls over on its side.
• The Stinger: Scenes playing over the credits became increasingly common (to the point of eventually being true for every episode) as the series went on. Usually they were just a Deleted Scene or What If? scenario, but occasionally they did conclude the plot of one of the previous segments.
• Stellification: In "Wishbones", Mindy finds the magical wishing skull and wishes to be a star, famous and renowned worldwide. She ends up tied onto a rocket, shot into space, and blown up like a normal star as part of the Jerkass Genie nature of the skull's wishes.
  Thromnambular the Wishing Skull: I'll make you the biggest star of all! But the bigger they are, the harder they fall!

• Sudden Anatomy: In one early episode, Mandy spontaneously grows nostrils when Billy picks her nose. Later on, however, her not having a nose is actually a plot point.
  • Grim is a more Egregious example: Being a Skeleton and all he's not supposed to have any functionality despite being able to move and funcition like any normal human right down to seeing without eyes, on occasion he will make comedy of his inability to smell or feel in some episodes but on others is quite reactive to bodily harm and the show's grossout humor.
• Suddenly Fluent in Gibberish: In Underfist, Irwin pleads with Hoss, Skarr, and Jeff that, among other things, Mindy was kidnapped by a marshmallow bunny. However, his hysterical Inelegant Blubbering couldn't be understood by anyone save Jeff, who speaks "crybaby."
• Super Window Jump: Played with.
• Swiss-Army Appendage: Hoss Delgado's prosthetic hand. It's typically a metal hand, chainsaw or Arm Cannon. (The video game even refers to it as a "Swiss Army Hand" in Hoss' bio.)

T

• Take That!: In "The Secret Snake Club", as Grim is rebooting the computer, the final line of the boot log (visible only for a moment) reads "matrix okay. sequels not so good."
• Tank Goodness: Hoss owns a giant fist-and-arm shaped one in Underfist, which partially provides the team's name. It bursts out of the ground blaring "La Cucaracha" for its' horn.
• Tarot Motifs: During the credits. Not named as such, but Billy is clearly The Fool, Mandy The Hierophant, and Grim... well, let's just say he ain't the Wheel Of Fortune.
• Team Pet: One-shot character "Admiral Wolverine Lightningbolt", an alien whom Billy named because "those are the three coolest words in the universe."
• Tempting Fate: At the beginning of "Tricycle of Terror", when Billy crashes his bike and comes back to it later he finds that he can still ride it, only for the tree it crashed into to snap and fall on it, then a meteor falls on it and the whole thing gets swallowed by the earth.
• Territorial Smurfette: One episode featured a tribe of Smurf expies and Grim tried to capture them. One of his attempts consisted on disguising himself as a female of their species, resulting on him getting a beating from their Smurfette.
• The Ahnold: Hoss Delgado, being a mix between Snake Plisken and Ash Williams. And Lil' Porkchop after he became huge, as he talks with an exagerated accent and his dorsal fin becomes a sort of crew-cut haircut.
• Thick-Line Animation
• Third-Person Person: Dracula.
• Those Two Guys: Grim and Mandy often play this part in the episodes that revolve around Billy.
• Toilet Humor: Constantly. In "Hog Wild", Billy, fed up with rules, tries to fart on Grim. Instead, he soils his pants.
  • Actually, this is at near-Running Gag level with Billy. You'd be hard-pressed to find an episode without at least one occasion of Billy needing to use the toilet or talking about how he soiled himself. Very common random joke for this show.
• Toilet Horror: Played for Laughs when Pud'n mistakes Billy disposing a skeleton model in the toilet as a gory incident.
• Tongue on the Flagpole: Billy gets his tongue frozen to Santa's sleigh in the Christmas Special.
• Too Dumb to Live: Billy, on a good day.
  • He somehow managed to get -5 in a IQ test.
• Too Spicy for Yog-Sothoth: Two examples act as joint Trope Namer:
  • "Big Trouble in Billy's Basement". Billy is pulled through a dimensional portal by Yog-Sothoth himself, but thrown back, and Billy explains in dejected tones "They didn't want me", prompting Hoss to say "Well, I guess that makes you a total loser".
  • In "Little Rock of Horrors", a brain-eating meteor-creature first attempts to eat Billy's brain but finds nothing. When it later devours Mandy's brain, it screams in pain, dies, and then reforms—but with Mandy in control. She comments "I guess my brain was a little too... spicy [for him]." Mandy then reuses the exact same gambit in "The Grim Adventures of the Kids Next Door", intentionally, to take control over the Delightful Reaper.
• Transplant: General Skarr from Evil Con Carne, who's nobly trying to give up a life of world domination for suburban normalcy. He's fond of garden gnomes and cornbread.
  • "Real corn makes it SPECIAL."
• Tuckerization: A few random one-off characters are named for members of the show's crew. A little boy in one of Grim's stories about Mrs. Doolin is named for one of the model cleaners and the beatboxing monster from "Prank Call of Cthulhu" is named after its production coordinator.
• Tuft of Head Fur: Sassy Cat has fluff on her head.

U

• The Ugly Guy's Hot Daughter: Gender inverted with Sperg and his mom.
• Unfortunate Search Results: In "The Secret Snake Club", Grim attempts to help the titular club with a summoning ritual by consulting information available on their website. However, because of a typo in the URL, Grim accidentally ends up on what is strongly implied to be a porn site, hastily attempting to cover the young group members' eyes.
• The Un-Reveal: In "My Fair Mandy," the entire episode is spent building up to her having to actually give a genuine, non-malicious smile for the first time in her life. However, when she finally accomplishes it, we only ever see a close up of her mouth stretching upwards, and a distant shot that doesn't give enough detail to clearly see her face in-full. It still doesn't stop the universe from unraveling as a result though.

V

• Vague Age: None of the main kids' (Billy, Mandy, Irwin, etc.) exact ages are ever mentioned (though they do appear to be around 10 or 11), and their school seems to be a combination of both elementary school and junior high. Billy mentions repeating the 2nd grade again, but that might have been just a one-off gag.
• Valley Girl: Eris was portrayed as one in her first appearance. To explain the change regarding her later characterization, Grim mentioned her going through a "Valley Girl phase."
• Verbal Tic:
  • Irwin, yo!
  • Also, Irwin's Dad, dude!
  • Fred Fredburger! Yes.
• Villainous Advice Song: The Musical Episode has a meteor (the Mean Green Mother From Outer Space, voiced by Voltaire) teaching Billy how he should go about retrieving brains in parts of the song.
• Villainous BSoD: In the football episode, Mindy has one when she and her cheerleaders are cast aside by the coach in favor of Mandy, despite Mindy's serious threats against her.
• Villain Decay: The Grim Reaper, In-Universe.
  Grim: I used to have a chariot of four-hundred burning horses. My arrival on the scene would be a raging thunderclap of fear! Now it's, "Hey, have you seen Grim?" "Yeah, I think he's wedged between a history textbook and a tuna fish sandwich!"

• Vignette Episode: "Wishbones" is pretty much an exercise in letting every regular on the show's writing staff do their own mini-sode, with the concept of a Jackass Genie skull being the sole unifying premise.
• Voluntary Shapeshifting: Nergal's son Nergal Jr. can take on anyone's appearance.
• Voodoo Shark: This exchange from "Guess What's Coming to Dinner":
  Hoss Delgado: And there I was, Goodacre-
  Principal Goodvibes: It's "Goodvibes"!
  Hoss: ...Surrounded twelve foot zombie poop elves! Nowhere to go but-
  Goodvibes: Excuse me, but, how could they be elves if they were 12 feet tall?
  Hoss: It was a leap year.

W

• Waiting Skeleton: In "The House of No Tomorrow", the gang waits on a very long line at an amusement park, and a skeleton (not Grim) is seen as one of the people on line.
• Was It All a Lie?: Parodied in "Scary Poppins". Being informed that Mandy is not related to him is such a shock to Billy's Dad that it causes him to question whether anything in his life is true, including his real son and his marriage. Granted, Billy's dad is an idiot.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: Jeff the Spider endlessly aims to please no matter how many times the arachnophobic and Too Dumb to Live Billy tries to murder him.
  Jeff: *while repeatedly jabbed in the eye with a large stick* Why won't you love me, Dad? I'll be whatever you want me to be!
  Billy: I want you to be dead!
• Weirdness Magnet: Anyone and anything associated with Grim.
  • Lampshaded in the crossover with KND; Numbuh 1 states all the weird stuff happening in Endsvile is why the KND prefer to stay away from that area.
• Werewolves Are Dogs: In "Tween Wolf", Irwin turns into a werewolf; Billy ends up adopting him (naming him "Sprinkles") and entering him into a dog show.
• We Will Meet Again: Numbuh 3 humorously makes a threat as if she were a villain promising revenge in Billy and Mandy's Big Boogey Adventure after Grim gets his job as the Grim Reaper back.
  Numbuh 3: I'll get you for this, Grim, if it's the last thing I do!
• Wham Line: Grim delivers one in "Dracula Must Die".
  Grim: Irwin's Grandmama is Dracula's wife?!
• When She Smiles: Two examples are given in "My Fair Mandy". Mandy ends up smiling at the beauty pageant, but it causes reality to unravel entirely and her, Grim, and Billy wake up as The Powerpuff Girls. The other example is the underworld makeup specialist Crabina, who is seen smiling when Mandy begins her part of the talent portion of the contest in spite of implying earlier that she is incapable of smiling because of the work done on her face.
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue:
  • Big Boogey Adventure: Grim returns to fighting supernatural toilet clogs, Mandy takes over as captain of the Boogey Bay, Billy becomes President of the United States, Irwin falls ill due to catching mono and cooties from kissing Mandy, Skarr uses the hole in his torso as a bird feeder, Creeper makes a fortune off selling time travel pants, Billybot and Mandroid transform into spaceships and embark on a career as crimefighters, Hoss Delgado does not appear in the movie and is left watching the events on TV, the cyclops guardians get their own cooking show, the Kraken was arrested for 8-armed robbery, Numbuh 3 attempts to start her own reaping business, with less than stellar results, Horror becomes a rock god using his ability to play guitar with his teeth, Boogey becomes a shut-in after becoming afraid of everything, and Grim's scythe is quickly stolen again, this time by Dracula who uses it as a golf club.
  • "Billy & Mandy Moon the Moon": Sperg continued living without a head, Mandy and Grim continued fighting crime throughout space as Milk Mandy and the Cheese Reaper, and Billy went home, with his parents not noticing he's in his Green Squeaker persona and also now a werewolf.
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: Jack O' Lantern, although in his case it's less "immortality sucks" than it is "immortality having to wear a pumpkin for a head sucks".
  Jack: 364 days a year, I can't even go to the ding-dong grocery store to buy pudding! And do you know why?!
• Who Writes This Crap?!: Played for Laughs occasionally, where it cues to a monkey or a baby in front of a typewriter.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Billy has severe arachnophobia, which is bad news for Jeff.
  • He also has a fear of clowns and the mailman.
    • And spider-clown-mailmen.
  • Irwin's greatest fears are stand-up comedy and bears. Cue him getting mauled by them very quickly.
  • Mandy's greatest fear is the possibility that she will grow out of being who she is, and actually become nice... and furthermore, marries Irwin.
  Mandy: "I'm glad that's over with." *Gets mauled by the bears*
  • Grim and Billy believe that Mandy is afraid of ice skaters, but Mandy denies it, she just "doesn't trust the way they spin".
  Grim: Like that ice skating thing?
  Mandy: It's not a thing, alright? It's not... a thing!
• Wild Teen Party: In "The Show That Dare Not Speak Its Name", Pinface invites a bunch of frat house demons and they proceed to wreck Billy's house. Harold, instead of doing literally anything else, joins the monsters in trashing his own house, and when Gladys comes home, she's rightfully mad at him.
• With Friends Like These...: Grim, Billy and Mandy's supposed "best friend," is normally treated like little more than a slave, and openly mentions on more than one occasion that he often fantasizes about killing them.
• Wizarding School: Dean Toadblatt's School of Sorcery.
• What Happened to the Hamster?: Remember how this all started with Billy's hamster? Never heard from again except in flashbacks.
  • There is one episode where it saves Billy's more visible cat Milkshakes from a fire or something, only to be eaten. It breaks free in the end and Billy mugs the camera to announce "Oh, come on, like we'd really do that."
• Women Are Wiser: Played With - they're much smarter on average than the men, most of whom wouldn't even be able to function in the real world, but they also tend to be either batshit insane or horribly unpleasant.
• The Worf Effect: Played for laughs. Pretty much any problem in the series could be easily solved with Grim's Reality Warper powers, but something always gets in his way, most often his scythe being stolen/transformed/running out of batteries. Though most of the time, this could be attributed to his own stupidity.
• World of Weirdness: While a walking, talking skeleton with a scythe would have turned heads at the start of the series, as time went on it becomes host to a wide variety of supernatural hokum that Unusually Uninteresting Sight became the norm.

Y

• Yandere:
  • Nergal Jr. (although a sweet and lonely child) can become so obsessed with making friends that if someone befriends him, he'll do anything to make sure that he is their best friend. Usually, he doesn't realize how angry and jealous he can get.
  • His father was a bit like this himself.
  • The rabbit from "Wishbones".
• You Can't Fight Fate: In Big Boogey Adventure, the Bad Future version of Billy goes back in time to stop Mandy from taking over Endsville. He succeeds, only to return to the future and see that Fred Fredburger is now in her position.
• Your Brain Won't Be Much of a Meal: The brain-eating meteor doesn't find anything in Billy's head. Human and Martian zombies also find nothing appetizing in Billy's head.
• Your Size May Vary: The Squid Hat is the size of a small hat in his debut episode. By his final episode, he's as large as Toadblatt himself.

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