Crazy danger everywhere, annoying Ogo in my hair!
Robot builds a strange machine, Monster blown to smithereens!
Boom, crash, Marf, EXPLOSIONS!
Robot and Monster is an animated series from Nickelodeonnote created by Dave Pressler, Joshua Sternin and Jennifer Ventimilia. It chronicles the misadventures of two best friends, Robot Default (Curtis Armstrong) and Monster Krumholtz (Harland Williams), who live together and work in the Blinking Lights Factory. They live in a world where Robotic Mechanicals and Monstrous Organics are unified by their shared love of bacon.
Robot is an inventor whose experiments usually fail, often explosively. He tends to be short-tempered, partly because of his failed experiments and partly because his family, who run the factory and find him to be a complete disappointment. Monster, on the other hand, is an eternal optimist who always looks at the brighter side of things and is the self-proclaimed "Happiest Guy in the World". The humor often comes from the duo tackling a problem with their distinct personalities.
The show had little network support. New episodes premiered Out of Order before the main network dropped the series in January 2013, leaving 3 regular episodes and a half-hour special unaired. From December 2013 to February 2015, three out of four episodes were slowly burned off on the Nicktoons channel, and the remaining episode was released to the Noggin streaming app in March 2015. Additionally, Amazon released a manufacture-on-demand DVD of the complete series, but it was discontinued in 2021.
In essence, Robot and Monster was essentially a warmup act for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012), which was created by the same people and premiered in the same year. That being said, Robot and Monster wasn't a bad show, it simply couldn't find the right audience at the time, even without the network's antics. At the very least, it was one of the only Nicktoons to receive a 4/5 rating by Common Sense Media.
Now has a work-in-progress recap page.
Dave Pressler was also a character designer for The Save-Ums! and created another series, How to Do Everything! with Garrick & Marvin, which premiered in 2014.
Robot and Monster contains examples of:
- Ambiguously Evil: In "A Better Marftrap," Marf is prone to violent outbursts and seems to dislike Robot at first.
- Big Bad: It was implied that Gart was this, though that title was likely taken by Pendulum Depot in the episode "Family Business". However, he only appeared in that episode due to the show's second season being put out of production. (Strangely, in that same episode, Monster helped Gart express his positive feelings towards Robot, and it worked out pretty well.)
- Big Red Button: In one episode, Robot and Monster try to run the Makin' Bakin. They are told not to press the red "Make Every Problem Go Away Button" on the counter. Guess how it does just that?
- Blood Knight: J.D. and Spitfire like to ride around fighting crime, but Spitfire admits it's mostly for the fighting.
- Brought to You by the Letter "S": Robot, Gart, and Arpa have their first initials on their hatch, and they are detachable.
- Bungling Inventor: Robot's inventions usually end up exploding or tearing him apart. They do work sometimes but usually backfire in some way, even after working for a while.
- Christmas Episode...er...Baconmas Episode. Once the series was canceled, it wound up acting as a sort of series finale, while the REAL series finale aired on Nicktoons in 2014. The episode was somehow swiftly pulled out of rotation in 2014, possibly because that Ogo's allergic reactions were too much for the kids.
- Clownification: In the episode "Doctor? No!", Robot becomes sick with a disease that will turn him into a mime, which are considered horrifying creatures in-universe. When Monster takes him to a doctor, they're told that the only cure is a lollipop (much to Robot's dismay, as he has an Absurd Phobia of them).
- Dartboard of Hate: In "The Bad News Baconeers" Robot has a dartboard with a picture of Gart as Napoleon on it.
- Delayed Reaction: In "Game Boys" after Robot botches the Pole-O match Monster tells him that you usually won't feel the pain until the next morning. Then the following morning both of them scream in pain and collapse after they get out of bed and try to open the window.
- Divine Race Lift: Mechanicals and Organics both believe that Saint Crispy was one of them. Turns out he's both.
- A Dog Named "Dog": Robot and Monster. Strangely averted with everyone else.
- Does This Remind Youof Anything: In "The Blimp", Robot and Monster tries to stop eating bacon for a week is akin to drug addicts who wants to quit drugs only to fail when Nessie, who is like a toxic person, persuade them to eat bacon thus preventing them from buying a blimp.
- Everyone Has Standards: Towards the end of "Baconmas", Saint Crispy offers Ogo bacon despite the latter telling him of his allergies. After eating the bacon, Ogo seemed fine, only to start swelling and fainting from the consumption. When confronted by Robot for this act, Saint Crispy sheepishly leaves the apartment, claiming that he has other houses to visit. In spite of how some of them find Ogo annoying, Robot, Monster, and their families express genuine concern for Ogo, with Gart threatening Saint Crispy that the latter would be hearing from their lawyers.
- Everyone Hates Mimes: The episode "Doctor? No!" puts this out in a rather hilarious way.
- Fantastic Racism: Robot's Grandmother hates Organics
- Grows on Trees: Bacon, as seen in "The Bacon Tree".
- Jet Pack: Ogo is equipped with one.
- Jerkass: Robot's family, especially Gart.
- Jerkass Ball: Nessie grabs this in "The Blimp" where she tries to prevent Robot and Monster from buying a blimp just so she can have customers.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Bossy and egotistical moments aside, Robot does have a heart.
- Karma Houdini: In "Boomerang", Monster spends all day trying to prove that Gart will get what's coming to him by doing bad things himself, only for good things to happen all day. Then after a crazy chain of events, Gart's blimp gets disintegrated by Robot's invention, and then he gets rolled over by the giant gear he caused to roll around the factory, then shortly after the crystal case Monster had that was full of money breaks and all the money falls out.
- Lucy, in a particularly cruel episode.
- Mad Scientist: Robot has shades of it, especially when an invention he makes is working.
- Manipulative Bastard: When Gart finds Robot's Pole-O team cheating against his he makes up a sob story about his team performing badly due to having square wheels and that every team they've played against (keep in mind that Robot's team is the only other team Gart's has fought) let them win because of this disability, turning the crowd against Robot.
- My Friends... and Zoidberg: Happened twice in the show.
- Gart: Attention Valued Employees... and Robot.Robot: Monster, your tree is trying to kill all our friends... and Ogo.
- No Mouth: This is seen on one background character.
- No OSHA Compliance: The Blinking Light Factory shows signs of this, namely gears frequently coming loose and posing a risk to employees.
- Parental Favoritism: As you would expect considering every other facet of Robot's life, his and Gart's parents both prefer the latter, mostly because he's actually successful.
- Pervert Revenge Mode: In one episode people ask Nessie if she used to shake her bacon (a reference to dancing) and get slapped by an offended Nessie. This joke happened twice.
- Precocious Crush: Monster's little sister Globitha has one on Robot
- Punny Name: Robot's family name is 'Default', ergo the initial state a product is in when it's first sold. Perry gets his name from 'periscope', which is what his body is shaped like.
- In "Game Boys" Gart's Pole-O team is named the Default Settings.
- In "The Bad News Baconeers" Robot's Pole-O team is the titular Baconeers and Gart's team is the Gartgantuans.
- Ridiculously Human Robots: They can contract diseases (like robies), have allergies (Ogo is allergic to bacon), and, as mentioned above, eat bacon.
- The Rival: Pendulum Depot to Gart.
- Serious Business: Where the characters live crosswalk safety is taken very seriously, to the point that you can be arrested for jaywalking or having your license to walk revoked.
- Shout-Out: In "The Bacon Tree" Monster grows a homicidal plant named Audrey.
- Sibling Yin-Yang: Robot is cranky but nice, full of bad luck, hardworking, and can tolerate failure, while Gart is calm but mean, full of good luck, lazy (He's the owner of a successful company), and can't tolerate even the most trivial failure.
- Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: Gart and Lucy to Robot.
- Stalker with a Crush: Ogo IS this. Also Audrey, as a result of too much love by Monster. Other than the fact she can't talk, she is Yandere as well.
- Stepford Smiler: Perry, whose face is perpetually stuck smiling.
- Trend Aesop: Happens in "Dirty Money". Robot is nervous that all people around him own the Giggle Stick. Needless to say, he manages to acquire enough money and buy it, just as the trend goes out of style, in favor of the Chuckle Hat.
- The Unintelligible: Marf normally seems to just repeat his name, but it's shown in one episode to actually be conversation... very mean conversation.
- Robot's Grandmother only speaks the "old language" Binary
- We Are Not Going Through That Again: At the end of "Dirty Money", when Robot spent two whole months finding prices of Gart's 86-dollar bill and glueing them back together, the Giggle-Stick fad faded away and got replaced by Chuckle-Hats, much to Robot's anger.
- Yank the Dog's Chain: In one episode Perry gets a cure for his perpetual smiling... for about a minute.
- You Mean X Mas: They celebrate Baconmas, which is a celebration of Bacon, and how it holds Mechanical and Organic society together.
- You Wouldn't Hit a Guy with Glasses: Crikey would, it's his favorite thing to do.
