Trivia / The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy

• Accidentally-Correct Writing:
  • How accidental is up to debate, but the show's version of Dracula is actually pretty accurate compared to the original novel, especially in terms of appearance. They even got the Daywalking Vampire thing right!
  • While the show's version of Thor in "A Kick in the Asgard" isn't physically accurate to the mythical warrior (once again being blonde as opposed to a redhead) they were correct in that Thor in Norse myth was very stupid and gullible, as evidenced by how easily he's defeated in battle and how easily Billy took Mjölnir.
• Acting for Two: There are a few examples in the series:
  • Billy and his father Harold are both voiced by Richard Steven Horvitz.
  • Grim and Sperg have a few scenes together throughout the series; both of them are voiced by Greg Eagles.
  • Irwin's family is full of this. Irwin's dad, grandmother, and grandfather (Dracula) are all voiced by Phil Lamarr. Vanessa Marshall voices Irwin's mother and Irwin himself.
• Actor-Inspired Element:
  • Grim wasn't conceived as having a Jamaican accent. Greg Eagles just did a deep voice in his audition and was told to "put a twist on it." He attempted to do a Trinidadian accent, modelled after famous actor Geoffrey Holder, but it came out as Jamaican, which everyone thought worked much better.
    • Rumor speculated that Eagles attempted a Swedish accent, but Eagles himself confirmed it was never the case.
  • Likewise, Vanessa Marshall, who is white, was unaware that Irwin was African-American when she started voicing the character, having only seen a line drawing beforehand, which led to the writers incorporating more jive talk in his dialogue.
• Celebrity Voice Actor:
  • David Warner was the original voice of Nergal before being replaced by Martin Jarvis.
  • John Vernon was the original voice of Dean Toadblatt before being replaced by Ronnie Schell.
  • Kurtwood Smith voices Grim's Dad in "Dad Day Afternoon".
  • Henry Gibson is Lord Pain in "House of Pain".
  • Wayne Knight voices Jack O'Lantern in "Billy & Mandy's Jacked-Up Halloween".
  • Michael Dorn and R. Lee Ermey are King Beardbottom and the Drill Sergeant in "Here Thar Be Dwarves".
  • Gilbert Gottfried, Carol Kane and Malcolm McDowell are Santa Claus, Mrs. Claus and Baron Von Ghoulish in "Billy & Mandy Save Christmas".
  • Louie Anderson voices Burt in "Fear and Loathing in Endsville".
  • The late Betty White voiced Mrs. Doolin in "Who Killed Who?".
• Channel Hop: The show aired on mainline Cartoon Network for the duration of its run. However, in 2023, reruns started airing on [adult swim] as part of its new "Checkered Past" block of classic Cartoon Network shows.
• Children Voicing Children: Played straight with Nigel Planter, who was voiced by Jake Thomas (of Lizzie McGuire fame), whose age was 13 when the character debuted.
• Cowboy BeBop at His Computer: The official Netflix description for the show calls Billy and Mandy siblings. While they hang out a lot, they're not related in any sense of the word.
• Creator Backlash: Vanessa Marshall has distanced herself from her role as Irwin, saying that an African-American actor should have voiced him.
• Cross-Dressing Voices:
  • Irwin is voiced by Vanessa Marshall, Pud'n is voiced by Jane Carr, and Nergal Jr. is voiced by Debi Derryberry.
  • Irwin's grandmama Tanya is voiced by Phil Lamarr.
  • Lubber, a female worm-like creature who has a major crush on Grim in "The Secret Decoder Ring" is voiced by Charlie Adler.
• Descended Creator: Maxwell Atoms voices Jeff the Spider. He also voices Piff in the episode "Crushed".
• Diagnosis of God: Maxwell Atoms (who has Asperger's) revealed that Billy, Mandy and Grim are autistic.
• End of an Age: "Meet the Reaper" was the very last new cartoon (that isn't a continuation of a legacy franchise) to be made under the Hanna-Barbera name and bear its logo. By the time Grim and Evil formally began production, the transition from Hanna-Barbera to Cartoon Network Studios was complete.
• Fake Brit: Eris, whose American voice actress, Rachael MacFarlane, uses a British accent. What makes it funny, however, is that she's supposed to be a GREEK goddess. Furthermore, she also speaks like a Valley Girl. Mainly, though, her mannerisms were meant to be a reference to Madonna.
• Fake Nationality: American Greg Eagles uses a Jamaican accent for Grim.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The first season was released on DVD but that has long since gone out of print. The same can be said for Big Boogey Adventure's DVD, and several episodes that were released either on Cartoon Network Holiday Compilations or as extras on other DVDs. Other than that, you had to rely on recordings from the Cartoon Network broadcasts and hope those wouldn't be taken down due to copyright. Thankfully, the entire series (sans Billy & Mandy’s Big Boogey Adventure, the Christmas Special, and Underfist) is available on iTunes, Prime Video, and, as of 2021, HBO Max. The show's first two seasons were also on Netflix, but are no longer there.
  • As of June 2021, the entire series, including Billy & Mandy's Big Boogey Adventure, Underfist and the Christmas Special, are available on HBO Max in Latin America
  • Grim & Evil in its original format. While every individual episode is easily available in the repackages of this show and Evil Con Carne after both split up, it's very difficult to find Grim & Evil itself (possibly a result of this), and additional Mandy intros that weren't reused for the standalone Billy & Mandy series became rare. This is even moreso the case of the unaired third season, as it only properly aired as G&E in international countries. While the entirety of G&E was at one point made available through VOD services in 2017 (including the unaired third season, where it finally saw release), it was quietly removed in 2019.
• Money, Dear Boy: Ever wonder why the majority of "Little Rock of Horrors" is just the Voltaire song? It's because Cartoon Network was paying him by however many seconds of music he composed, hence his padding it out with instrumental vamping to make it as long as possible.
• The Other Darrin:
  • In the pilot short, Billy and Mandy in: Trepanation of the Skull and You, Billy was originally voiced by series creator Maxwell Atoms, while Mandy was voiced by his sister, Nicole. In the series proper, Billy and Mandy are respectively voiced by Richard Steven Horvitz and Grey DeLisle.
  • David Warner was the original voice of Nergal, but was later replaced with Martin Jarvis.
  • Dean Toadblatt was voiced by John Vernon in his first three appearances, but due to his death, in "Nigel Planter and the Order of the Peanuts", Vernon was replaced with Ronnie Schell, who gave Toadblatt a much different hillbilly-like attitude. The change was lampshaded by one of the students at Toadblatt's, and the change may have been used to make reference to the fact that the same thing had happened with Albus Dumbledore in the Harry Potter films.
  • Wayne Knight was the original voice of Jack O' Lantern, but in the video game, he was replaced with Maurice LaMarche.
• The Other Marty: Grey DeLisle revealed that she replaced Maxwell Atoms' then wife as the voice of Mandy in the final version of "Meet the Reaper".
• Out of Order: The episode order is severely scrambled on HBO Max. Most notably, the episode with "Meet the Reaper" is the 11th episode of the first season.
• Posthumous Credit: John Vernon's final performance as Dean Toadblatt aired several months after his death in February 2005.
• Playing Against Type: Vanessa Marshall, traditionally known for playing adult female characters, voices the young male Irwin.
• Real Life Writes the Plot: Part of the eeriness in "BRAINS" is how its performed in an odd off key. This happened purely on accident, as it was the result of Voltaire not tuning his guitar before recording, and the other instrumentalists trying to tune to him. He’s even commented that he hasn't quite been able to match it since.
• Role Reprise:
  • With the aforementioned exception of Maurice LaMarche replacing Wayne Knight as the voice of Jack O' Lantern, every character featured in the video game is played by the same voice actor who plays them in the show.
  • Tom Kenny reprises his role as Boo-Boo in "Here Thar Be Dwarves" after previously voicing him on I Am Weasel and Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law.
  • James Arnold Taylor reprises his role of Fred Flintstone in "Modern Primitives" after voicing him in various commercials. The same episode also has Frank Welker return as Barney Rubble (from various media since 1990) and Grey DeLisle as Betty Rubble (from The Flintstones On The Rocks).
• Screwed by the Network: According to Maxwell Atoms, Michael Ouweleen, who became an executive within Cartoon Network during the show's final season, publicly fired him during a meeting, dressing him down and accusing him of ruining the Cartoon Network brand with his "hateful fart cartoon," which is why Underfist was canceled after its pilot movie.
• Same Content, Different Rating: The show was originally rated TV-Y7-FV for its original run, but beginning in 2023 after reruns of the show began airing on Adult Swim, the series was re-rated TV-PG, even on Max, where the show originally had its former rating back when it was added to the service.
• Surprisingly Lenient Censor: Word of God from Maxwell Atoms is that the rampant Black Comedy on the show generally got past unopposed. He attributes this to the censors not really being used to dealing with that style of humor, and instead they focused more on clamping down on crude sex jokes and language.
• Throw It In!: Greg Eagles originally intended to voice Grim with a Trinidadian accent as a Shout-Out to actor Geoffrey Holder, but it accidentally came out sounding more Jamaican and they decided to just go with that because it sounded funnier.
• Tuckerization: According to a Tumblr post from series creator Maxwell Atoms, Sperg was named after one of the writers' childhood friends, whose last name was Spergel.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The Underfist movie was meant as a backdoor pilot for a new spin-off series. Atoms confirmed in an interview with RebelTaxi that changes in network management during the TV movie's production killed plans for the show.
    • It was rumored that Jack O’Lantern was supposed to make a cameo in Underfist, but it was cut.
  • Grim was initially going to be an expy of Dr. Smith, complete with Jonathan Harris voicing him.
  • Mandy's original design◊ was closer to her appearance in Maxwell Atoms' short film where she originally appeared, having Girlish Pigtails and Black Bead Eyes. Also, she was originally going to have red hair.
  • "Brains!" originally had one lyric about Dumb Blondes: "Bring me a brunette, a redhead, I just don't care, just don't bring me those girls with the long blonde hair, 'cause everyone knows there's nothing in there." Cartoon Network vetoed it for being potentially offensive.
  • The appearance of human Grim in "Night of the Living Grim" was originally meant to resemble his voice actor, Greg Eagles, before someone pointed out the dubious optics of two white children owning a black man.
  • While on the Pizza Party Podcast, Maxwell Atoms confirmed that Jeff the Spider was planned as a playable character in the video game, but got cut at the last minute for predictable reasons; he's a harder to program giant spider rather than a bipedal humanoid. Billy's mom and Mindy were also considered for the game's roster.
  • The show was pitched to Nickelodeon before Cartoon Network. Nickelodeon rejected it on the basis that, while they liked the pitch, no one would greenlight a kids' show starring the Grim Reaper as a main character.
  • Atoms revealed on his Tumblr that he had considered using Krampus in the Christmas Special, but since Krampus looks demonic and Cartoon Network executives had come to regret allow having previous shows use "the Devil" as a character, he didn't bother to even pitch that version.
  • In the crossover episode with Codename: Kids Next Door, Mandy was originally going to torture Numbuh 1 by having him watch Sheep in the Big City, but the execs turned it down; both because they were concerned Sheep in the Big City creator Mo Willems would be offended by the joke (he wasn't) and believing it was too obscure of a reference. They changed it to Numbuh 1 being tortured with Evil Con Carne, but it was still thought to be too obscure of a reference, hence the final episode having Numbuh 1 being tortured by Fred Fredburger.
  • In 2021, Atoms pitched a revival movie for Billy & Mandy, titled “Billy & Mandy Destroy Us All (A Cosmic Horror Musical)”. The pitch was rejected by Cartoon Network due to their target audience being unfamiliar with the series by that point. Atoms elaborated on the pitch in this Patreon post, noting that it was a multiverse story "about living life with Autism". The villain of the movie would have been "The Edgelord", the Reaper of the Multiverse, who eliminates universes with paradoxes. The film would also have revealed that the show's Negative Continuity had all actually occurred across different universes.
    The script starts with Mandy at age 20-ish. And her life isn’t what she thought it was going to be. She works at a diner rather than ruling the world. She lives at home with her parents, who now make unboxing videos to stay afloat. Grim and Billy have moved away after some horrible fight. She’s friends with Irwin and Mindy. And on top of it all, she’s been diagnosed with “Frownington’s Syndrome”, so her characteristic scowl has just been a medical condition rather than anything she chose for herself. In short– everything seems to suck.
    [...] The primary cast was to be Future Grim from the Dune episode, Adult Mandy, and a typical Billy. Later on, they pick up the pilot versions of the characters for a bit. Eris played a heavy supporting role.
    [...] So basically, every time Billy ate himself or Mandy wished the world out of existence, those things actually happened. We get to revisit old episodes. We get alternate Billys and Mandys. We get to see some cool apocalypses. We return to The Halls of Time. There’s a boppin’ song I’m particularly fond of called “Rise From The Grave” where Billy, Mandy, and Grim go to all of the universes where Billy & Mandy have died in order to resurrect a zombie army.
• Write What You Know: Evidently, Mandy is based on Maxwell Atoms' ex-wife.
• Written by Cast Member: Richard Horvitz wrote two episodes: "The Bad News Ghouls" (with Vincent Waller, who also storyboarded this episode) and "Keeper of the Reaper" (with his wife Kristen Lazarian and C.H. Greenblatt, who storyboarded the episode and voiced Fred Fredburger).
  • Speaking of C.H. Greenblatt, every episode Fred appeared was also written and storyboarded by him.
  • An earlier episode, "Educating Grim", was written by Mindy's voice actress Rachael MacFarlane.
• You Look Familiar: Diedrich Bader as Hoss Delgado and Pat the Baker (a wussy video game character that Billy likes). Lampshaded in "Brown Evil", when Mandy and Grim say "It's Hoss Delgado!" while Billy yells "It's Pat the Baker!".

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