Western Animation / Golan the Insatiable

Golan: I am Golan the Insatiable! God-lord terrible of Gkruool! Crusher of wills! IMPREGNATOR OF THE UN-IMPREGNABLE!
Dylan: Do... you wanna' come over?
Golan: Sure! Take me to your castle, little boy!

— first meeting

Golan the Insatiable is an animated series that premiered on Fox's ADHD block on January 11, 2014, and is based on stories written by creator Josh Miller that first appeared on the website Something Awful and executive produced by Matt Silverstein and David Jeser, who previously worked on Drawn Together.

It stars 6-year-old goth girl Dylan Beekler and her best friend, the titular demigod warlord from the Gkruool dimension banished to Earth by a rebellion. Golan is always looking for ways to conquer the town of Oak Grove, Minnesota in addition to returning to Gkruool.

After having 6 11-minute episodes on the ADHD block, a full-fledged 6-episode 22-minute series premiered on Fox in May 31st, 2015. You can see the trailer for that here.

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Golan the Insatiable provides examples of:

• Adapted Out: Mainly Dylan's father.
• Affably Evil: Golan is surprisingly fun to hang around, despite being a blood-thirsty warlord demigod. The Beeklers treat him like one of the family. Especially evident in "Winter is Staying", where Golan mostly acts like how a kid thinks an evil overlord would. A kid with the power and resources to take his fantasies to an actual, murderous conclusion.
• Alien Blood: In "Winter is Staying", when Carole runs over Golan with her car he bleeds purple blood, even though he had red blood in an earlier scene and all other episodes.
• Alien Gender Confusion: Golan, a warrior king from another dimension, sometimes has trouble telling human boys and girls apart.
• Alpha Bitch: Mackenzie B.
• Ambiguously Bi: Although Golan is very sex-obsessed when it comes to women and he has both romantic and sexual feelings for pretty much every female he sees between the ages of teenager (Alexis) to senior citizen (Mrs. Budnick), he may likely be bi as from time to time, he has been shown doing many things that imply that he's attracted to men, like taking pleasure from sexualizing Kieth's remains in the first pilot episode and kissing a stoner guy on the face a bunch of times in the episode Shell-Raiser.
• Asshole Victim: Mackenzie B and her Girl Posse get justified for bullying Dylan at the end of almost every episode they appear in.
• Black Comedy: Oh, does this show ever run on this. Even more so for the new show.
• Body Horror: All the time with this show, but one of the biggest moments would be in "Golan the Impregnable", when Golan gave birth to a disgusting and disfigured tentacle monster hybrid between himself and Dylan named Princess Penis.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: In "Golan the Impregnable", Keith made a joke which caused the "audience" to laugh at him. He was then seen breaking character to smile at them after doing so.
  Keith: Why do you think that I would beat up a teenage girl? Do I look like an Islamic fundamentalist to you?
  [the audience starts laughing and applauding him]
• Brick Joke: In "Golan the Impregnable," Golan throws a keg at the rock quarry party. Later, on the night of the pre-coming dance, it falls on Keith and puts him in a persistent vegetative state.
• Card-Carrying Villain: Golan openly refers to himself as evil several times.
• Character Title
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: In the six pilot pitches, which sort of became a little season, the Beekler family had a dad named Richard but in the actual series, he was gone and Carole was a single mother. They do have, however, had some Easter Eggs of him in the background of a few episodes and some episode will have a subtle but undeniable Continuity Nod to them previously having a dad.
• Crapsack World: Gkruool, based on the few glimpses we get and information from Golan, is a Hyborian Age esque barbaric hellscape where everyone is torturing and/or slaughtering everyone else.
• Creator Thumbprint: This show contains lots of Black Comedy, intentional Negative Continuity, and very subtle references to Judaism, just like Drawn Together, another show by the same creators. Not to mention some running gags from Drawn Together have appeared a few times in the show. In "On Golan Pond" for instance, Golan used the recurring Uh-Duuuuuh! joke on Dylan.
  Dylan: Ew, Golan, this fruit tastes disgusting. Why do you eat it?
  Golan: You don't eat it for the flavor, you eat it for the fertility. Uh-Duuuuuuh!
• Crossing the Burnt Bridge: In "A Pox on Your Pox", thinking she's leaving to live in Golan's homeworld, Dylan confesses to her family that she really does love them and then she has to suffer the embarrassment of going back to them after that when the portal doesn't work. Golan finds this absolutely hilarious.
• Disappeared Dad: Mr. Beekler isn't in the 2015 episodes due to Golan serving as a Parental Substitute.
  Carole: She doesn't have a father.
• DIY Dentistry: In order to lure the Tooth Fairy back to the Beekler residence, Golan ties one of Dylan's teeth to a brick while they're on the top of the house - then pushes Dylan off while holding onto the brick. The tooth comes out.
• Drugs Are Bad: Parodied in "Shell Raiser". Golan starts smoking pot and this is treated as bad... because the pot smoking is keeping him distracted from killing people.
• Dysfunction Junction: Dylan is a little girl who is depressed and violent and obsessed with murder and horrible things.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: In the pilot episodes of the show, Golan and Dylan's voices are completely different so are their physical appearances to a lesser extent. The family also has a father named Richard.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • In the pilot, Golan cringed when he learned the mean girls that he and Dylan just killed were children.
  • Golan will not deny someone a kiss goodbye, as he is not a monster.
  • Golan is equally embarrassed about smoking pot, but more because it causes him to screw up more.
  • On Gkruool, all things are entitled to life... until they're old enough to smile. Then it's open season. For this reason, Golan decides against abortion, but has no problem murdering every guest at his party.
• Extreme Omnisexual: The traditional Gkruoolian memorial involves a gang bang with (and possibly eating) the remains. This is not limited to sentient creatures as Golan was more than happy to do this with a turtle. Also, his favorite part of murder is raping the remains.
• Eye Scream: How did Dylan get those black marks under her eyes? Kieth who had become Dylan's father figure after her real father died of Robot AIDS was seduced away from her by her sister, the trauma of this caused her to claw apart her bottom eyelids.
• Family Relationship Switcheroo: In "Shame on Pee", Alexis' most embarrassing secret is Dylan is really her daughter.
• Fish out of Temporal Water: Though Golan appears to have been living on Earth for a while, as nobody seems afraid of him unless he gets really mad.
• Friendless Background: Dylan hadn't any until Golan came into her life.
• From Bad to Worse: In the opening scene of the episode "Winter is Staying", Dylan and Golan throw snowballs at a family driving in a car. This causes them to crash (the bad). When preparing firewood, the couple accidentally burn their infant child (who was less than a year old) alive (the worse). They use a fire log as a replacement child until it is destroyed at the end of the episode.
• The "Fun" in "Funeral": The episode "Deer Uncle Gerald".
• Goth Girls Know Magic: Dylan was able to summon Golan because of this.
• Hartman Hips: Carole has some pretty extreme hartman hips going on, having a perfect circle the size of her head placed right in her bottom region. This is actually kind of the character design that was given to human characters in the show as pretty much every adult and teen in the series has this as well, even the men.
  Golan: You know, your bottom is rounder than your face would suggest.
• The Hedonist: Golan. He's called "Golan the Insatiable" for a reason.
• Jerkass at Your Discretion: In "I Can Smell That Cheap Clone From Here", Golan inadvertently gives birth to a duplicate of himself which unlike him, is a Kindhearted Simpleton who everyone loves. When nobody else is around, Clone Golan reveals that it's all an act to gain people's trust and he is actually just as evil as the original and even more intelligent and ambitious, devising a plan for both of them to take over Earth. Golan kills him after being told that he has to apologize to Dylan to build up his reputation in order for the plan to work.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Golan may be a tremendous Jerkass, but he does care about Dylan at times (in his own twisted way). Dylan is also the only person he cares about. Made more explicit in the 2015 series, where he's even a Jerkass towards her a lot of the time.
• Killer Rabbit: Mackenzie B's toys in the pilot episode. One of the Gkruoolian spells brings her stuffed animals to life and it starts off as magical and girly and happy-sappy as it needs to be, but when Mackenzie B pets one of them, they all transform into giant, demonic, monsters that bite her hand off, decapitate her mom, carry one of her friends out the window and just cause a huge bloodbath in her room.
• Large Ham:
  • Golan whenever he's excited, since he is an inter-dimensional demigod warlord.
  • Dylan hams it up whenever answering one of Golan's demands (or just interacting with anyone she doesn't particularly care about), but because of her age it ends up being more cute than imposing.
• Merlinand Nimue: Golan and Dylan almost fit this perfectly, except Dylan is not a magic user. However, Dylan does use magical spells from the Gkruoolian Tome on many occasions, so it's safe to say that although she, alone doesn't have any powers, she is still magical enough to qualify for this trope.
• Minnesota Nice: Played straight by every adult in town except Mackenzie B's mom. Invoked multiple times an episode.
• Negative Continuity:
  • In the 2015 pilot Mackenzie B loses her hand and she and her friends and her mom are implied to have died, but in the next episode they're all fine.
  • In "Shame on Pee", Alexis confesses that she's Dylan's birth mother, but considering Alexis is 17 and Dylan is 9, this is unlikely to be canon.
  • According to "On Golan Pond" the dad died, but in the very next episode it's said he walked out on the family.
• Never Learned to Read:
  • Dylan is revealed to be illiterate in "Dylan Crushes Reading". All those spells she cast never worked right because she just followed the pictures. Also, her tutor mentions that his brother killed himself because he was too ashamed of being illiterate, and that his suicide note was a bunch of frowny faces.
  • Averted in the 2015 series — while Dylan doesn't like reading, she's still capable of it.
• Offing the Offspring: In "Winter Is Staying", the parents accidentally burn their baby alive, while trying to keep themselves warm. It was an accidental murder as the man mistakenly put their baby in the fire. The parents use a fire log as their child for the rest of the episode as Golan destroys it in the climax.
• Parental Substitute: In the 2015 series, Golan is more or less put in the role of Dylan's father figure, including trying to have sex with her mother (he does).
• Perky Goth: Dylan has her moments of this.
• Pet Monstrosity: Sort of what Golan is to Dylan.
• Psychopathic Manchild: Golan maybe a bloodthirsty demigod with Super-Strength but he also has the maturity level and temperament of a petulant teenager.
• Running Gag: Every time Golan walks through a door, he is too tall to fit through so he just smashes a hole in the shape of his head and horns in the top of the threshold.
• Scars Are Forever: According to a flashback in "Golan the Impregnable", the black markings under Dylan's eyes are not make-up, but rather scars from her clawing at her face in anger.
• Sitcom Archnemesis: Mackenzie B to Dylan in the 2014 episodes. In the 2015 episodes she's a bully and more deserving of what punishment she gets.
• The Starscream: In the first episode of the 2015 series, Golan goes back to Gkruool the moment he's able to, only to find that his former acolyte has taken over and supplanted his throne, leading his former subjects in laughing at Golan behind his back.
• Strange Minds Think Alike: When Dylan makes a mace out of rubber bands, her mother tells her that "rubber bands are only for bunching asparagus". Golan later claims the same is true in his realm.
• Stupid Evil: A number of schemes and violent ideas go wrong for the simple fact that Golan keeps messing things up for a variety of reasons ranging from simple accidents to completely avoidable mistakes.
• Suck E. Cheese's: Pepe Roni's.
• Super-Empowering: The Gkruoolian Tome of infinite evil, although generally used by Gkruoolians, demigods, and other beings that already have magic powers, can be used by human beings, and non-magical creatures. Simply by enchanting a spell from a book will activate a spell or curse and make crazy stuff happen, including giving powers to the user of the spell.
• There Was a Door: A running gag in the series subverts this. Whenever Golan enters a building, he always uses the door, but whenever he walks through, his horns and the top of his head smash through the top of the threshold, leaving a hole in the wall.
• Tome of Eldritch Lore: How Dylan was able to summon Golan.
• Torches and Pitchforks: Parodied in the first episode of the main series. The "mob" is actually trying to welcome Golan, carrying torches so that it won't get too dark at night for him and pitchforks because a farmer was just doing some farmwork at the time.
• Trenchcoat Warfare: Done very dramatically by Dylan, when having her big fight with Golan in the season 1 finale.
  Golan: Whoa, bitch got weapons.
• Tsundere: Dylan acts like this towards Swingley, a mentally-disabled boy with a broken arm, mostly because he's too dumb to be properly intimidated by her. Unfortunately, Swingley finds a boyfriend by the end of the episode.
• Undying Loyalty: Dylan is extremely devoted to her "god lord."
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: Despite no longer having a father, Dylan used to be a normal, cheerful girl... until having her "big buddy" Keith seduced away by her sister drove her mad with grief.
• Villain Protagonist: Golan and Dylan.
• Yellow Eyes of Sneakiness: Golan's clone sports a pair of yellow peepers in contrast with the original's red and is far more cunning, being a total Bitch in Sheep's Clothing.

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