Western Animation / Tuttle Twins

"From Angel Studios comes a cartoon so 'radical' it doesn't give kids medical advice!" ^Note From left to right: Derek, Grandma Gabby, Emily, and Ethan.

"Vamonos! We have places to go, people to see, communists to offend!"

— Grandma Gabby

Tuttle Twins is a crowdfunded animated Edutainment Show created by Daniel Harmon.^note Not to be confused with Dan Harmon. The show is based on the book series of the same name created by Conner Boyack, who is also one of the show's executive producers. The first episode, "When Laws Give You Lemons" debuted on October 12th, 2021. Every episode can be viewed on YouTube and on the Angel Studios app for free.

The show focuses on twin siblings, Ethan and Emily Tuttle, who go on a series of crazy time-traveling adventures with their Cuban grandmother Gabby, and her pet raccoon Derek. Along the way, they revisit important places in history, meet well-known historical figures (such as Adam Smith, Benjamin Franklin, and Mahatma Gandhi), and learn important lessons on economics, government, freedom, and individual rights.

According to Daniel Harmon, the purpose of the show is to educate kids on the principles of freedom while still being fun and entertaining for a general family audience, and to reach 100 million children by the next decade.

The first season was funded by a total of 8,731 investors. The cartoon was formally the most crowdfunded kids show of all time before it was eventually surpassed by The Wingfeather Saga.

Their crowdfunding page can be found here.

Their YouTube Channel can be found here.

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This cartoon contains examples of:

Tropes A-J

• Alliteration & Adventurers: Crisis & Creatures is a Dungeons & Dragons-style Tabletop RPG with a name patterned after the latter's.
• Anachronistic Animal: Gabby finds and adopts the first Derek as a child living in Cuba in the 1940s. Raccoons were extirpated from Cuba in the 17th century.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Big Bob, owner of the Big Bob's Barbecue franchise, purchased protectionist legislation by bribing the soon-to-be mayor, thus preventing food trucks and other small business restaurants from operating anywhere within two miles of one of his restaurants, thereby forcing them all out of town where they can't get any business, or where working conditions are hazardous. He also wears white after Labor Day.
• Bad Future: In the season 1 finale, the twins and Karrine find themselves in one of these.
• Big Damn Heroes: Grandma Gabby (with help from Nikola Tesla) arrives just in time to save the twins and Karrine from being forcibly brainwashed in the season 1 finale.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: While everyone is trapped in the western age, Gabby points out that their only hope of getting back home is if the twins "learned a valuable lesson in the time it takes to watch a children’s show, not counting commercials if this goes to network.”
  • Gabby uses this gimmick on the regular.
• The Bully: Bruce enjoys picking on Ethan and tapes hurtful notes on his back. (i.e. “Kick me”, “Trip me”, and the worst one yet, “Ask me about my dead goldfish”, which is bad enough to push his Trauma Button.)
• Call-Back: Previous episodes are frequently referenced. The season 2 premier briefly recaps the aesop of the season 1 premier.
• Cassandra Truth: Karrine, who has been spying on Grandma Gabby, is also trying to expose her. She tries to convince the people around her that Gabby can travel through time and space using her wheelchair, but to no avail.
• Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys: In the pilot, the main characters bursting into Frederic Bastiat's study causes him to jump in fright and wave a white flag while shouting that he surrenders. He sheepishly claims it was just a joke a moment later.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Nikola Tesla appears in the second episode as a Brick Joke, where it's revealed he has his own time machine. He then suddenly returns in the season 1 finale to help Gabby rescue the twins just in the nick of time.
• Cliffhanger:
  • Episode 11, the penultimate episode of the first season, ends with Grandma Gabby getting arrested as a result of Karrine spying on her.
  • The season 1 finale ends with government agents getting their hands on a sample of the time machine's knowledge juice.
• Cycle of Revenge: The Tuttles learn the hard way in "War of the Worms" that revenge often leads to more revenge and can lead to devastating consequences. They also learn that the only way to break the cycle is for one side to choose not to fight back.
• Dumb Muscle: Bruce, the bully, qualifies for this trope. Yes, he's got muscle, but when Ethan kindly offers him a canvas for his project, he rejects his help solely because he believes his role in the show is to be a metaphor of certain nations who reject the value of free trade, and are deprived of its own benefits. He ends up getting an F as a result, much to his displeasure.
• Easter Egg: Each episode has a "golden gummy bear" (Ethan's Trademark Favorite Food) hidden within it. When the episode is livestreamed during its premier, the first viewer to spot it wins the graphic novel version of the episode.
• Election Day Episode: "Free Speech Freestyle" focuses on the election for the kids club president.
• Establishing Character Moment:
  • Karrine's first appearance has her confront the twins in their lemonade stand business. Uninterested in "buying" their lemonade, she held an emergency meeting last night at the kids club to make up a new law that would allow her, as president (a position she often brags about), to have all the lemonade she wants "for free, now and always, Amen." However, only one kid showed up, but Karrine threatened said kid to vote "yes" on the law, then calling the vote "unanimous" after the law was passed. Then when the twins had their backs turned, she takes away their lemonade stand with a wagon. So to sum it all up, Karren starts off as an everyday Jerkass who is willing to bend the rules if it means getting what she wants, even if it's just small things, and to control other members of her club through fear, and to be unnecessarily cruel to people at times. And on a side note, she gets angry whenever people mispronounce her name.
  • Turns out Karrine's parents made very sure she took after them in this regard. In their first appearance together, they're seen scolding Karrine for even having a competitor for Kids Club president, instead of being in total control of the neighborhood kids. They then tell her that if she doesn't wrest control back from the Tuttle twins, she'll lose her place as daughter of the year—to the family dog.
  • When we get to know of Bruce, we are shown a flashback of him actively picking on Ethan by taping notes on his back. To name a few; "Kick me", "Trip me", and last but not least, "Ask me about my dead goldfish". He thinks it's funny to rub salt into Ethan's emotional wounds about his dead goldfish, which goes to show how cruel, unempathetic, and sadistic he is.
• Even the Rats Won't Touch It: When Derek, who will usually eat just about anything, tries to eat a Cuban copy of the Communist Manifesto, he spits it back out in disgust and chitters angrily about how gross it is.
• Extreme Omnivore: Derek fits this trope to a tee. He eats almost anything in sight, but especially art supplies; pencils, crayons, and paint.
• Family-Friendly Firearms: Surprisingly averted from the start. During the second half of "When Laws Give You Lemons", which takes place in the wild west, several characters are seen holding firearms. There's even a violent (yet non-fatal) shoot-out in a saloon during the episode's climax.
• Fiction 500: Grandma Gabby is at least a trillionaire, and the show creators are silent on exactly how rich she is.
• Flat World:
  • In "War of the Worms", Copernicus' science project is a model of the solar system, but with Flat Earth being in the center of it. Later at the end, Emily helps Copernicus rebuild his model by replacing the flat earth with a lemon, which represents the sun. However, being The Ditz that he is, Copernicus now thinks that the center of the solar system is a giant lemon. He then eats it.
  • The Tuttles visit an actual Flat Earth, also known as "Flearth", in "Cake, Pies, and Flat Earth Guys". Funnily enough, everything on Flearth is also flat; from cardboard-cutout trees and buildings to Paper People.
• Freudian Excuse: A young Gabby of all people gives one of these when explaining why she took over a future utopia and turned it into a totalitarian regime. Turns out that instead of rejecting communism outright after suffering under it, young Gabby believed she could do it better.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: The two bandits have spent the majority of the second half of "When Laws Give You Lemons" stealing cows (both legally and illegally). Then when they're finally defeated, they both lament that they really need cows and are so jealous that Carla has so many of them. Emily sets them both straight by saying that it's no excuse to violate Carla's right to property.
• From Bad to Worse: As "War of the Worms" explores the theme of the Cycle of Revenge, this trope is in full swing. From what started off as a big Kick the Dog moment from Karrine ^Note She vandalizes the Tuttle's team flag, with the flagpole almost crushing the two, resulting in Ethan and Carl getting soaked in mud and almost inadvertently destroying Emily's science project, all at ONCE., to Emily getting even with her through an overnight prank, things get ''waaaaay'' out of hand! Pretty soon, the entire science camp is turned into a prank warzone, and everyone's science projects get ruined. By the end, if you thought it couldn't get any worse, it got to the point where some students attempt to drown Copernicus in a lake!
• Funny Background Event: Derek is the instigator of most of these, from trying to eat or drink things belonging to the Historical Domain Character of the week to stealing a cow to go on a date.
• Fun with Acronyms: The Freedom and Regulation Team (F.A.R.T.).

Larry: It's pronounced "fairt."

• Genius Ditz: Copernicus spends a lot of time out in nature and is very good at communicating with animals.
• The Golden Rule: The primary theme for "War of the Worms". This is explained to the Tuttles by none other than Mahatma Gandhi, who is a strong follower of the concept.
• Groin Attack: In "Wonky Wages," Ethan uses Derek to shoot a baseball at a communist guard. It hits him in the groin and crumples him to the ground for the rest of the scene.
• Gross-Up Close-Up: When Ethan reiterates the "An eye for an eye" quote from Gandhi to a group of worms, they reply that they don't have eyes. Cue a disturbing image of an eyeless worm, accompanied by the sound of a Screaming Woman.
• Hammerspace: Gabby's hair and Derek's stomach both act as this.
• Heel–Face Turn: Dictator Gabby has one of these upon seeing what her own future holds.
• Historical Domain Character: The twins visit at least one every episode.
• How We Got Here: The first episode begins with all the main characters traveling through time and space while struggling to hold on. Grandma Gabby worries that they aren’t going to make it, then the episode rewinds to 12 hours... whoops! 11 hours prior. When we return to that scene, it turns out Gabby was only bluffing and just wanted to provide the opening scene with some fake suspense, then she winks at the camera.
• Hurricane of Puns: The Cold Open for S2E1 depicts a growing war between two factions of anthropomorphic butterflies. Their exchange of dialogue is filled with puns.
• Implied Death Threat: From Napoleon Wormaparte: "Now we're gonna put them 6 feet underground, and not in the fun worm way."
• Inventional Wisdom: The Ironically Convenient Plot Twist button on Gabby's chair. Even she, the inventor of the chair, wonders why she has it.
• I Was Quite a Looker: Even though Gabby isn't proud of her behavior in her younger years, she still brags that she was beautiful.

Tropes K-Z

• Kick the Dog: In an inversion of a nearly literal form of this trope, Karrine's parents threaten to award the title of daughter of the year to the family dog if Karrine loses reelection to Kids Club president.
• Level Ate: The second half of "Pencils, Pirates & Ice Cream People" takes place in, as the title suggests, Ice Cream Land.
  Ethan: Grandma?? Are we in heaven?
  Gabby: I dunno. I've only been to the other place. Congress!
• Look Behind You: Used in "War of the Worms". When Gabby and the Twins try to go back in time without being spotted, Gabby distracts the other kids by saying that Nikola Tesla is here with a time machine. When the kids turned around to look, ...he's actually there! The same gag is used again later on.
• Love at First Sight: Derek immediately falls for President Coolidge's pet raccoon Rebecca.
• MacGyvering: Grandma Gabby turns her motorized wheelchair into a time machine using her Ph. D. in physics, some carbon alloy and the little plastic clip that holds the bread bag closed. And also an acetylene welding torch.
• Multigenerational Household: The Tuttle household becomes this when Grandma Gabby moves in.
• Never Mess with Granny: Gabby has been on both the receiving and giving end of this. At the same time.
• Never Say "Die": This is surprisingly averted for a children's cartoon. From the very first line of dialogue in the very first episode, we get this:
  Ethan: Emily, remind me why we're on this death trap again?!
• Non-Indicative Name: In the second half of the "When Laws Give You Lemons", we have a town located in the wild west named "Quiet Valley". Cue woman screaming from a distance. Justified, because the town was once peaceful before it had to put up with two bandits whose goals are to steal people's cows.
• Noodle Incident: Whatever Gabby did to the secret service agents the last time she visited President Coolidge, they really don't want a repeat of it.
• Not in Front of the Kid: When Mrs. Tuttle purrs suggestively at Mr. Tuttle in front of three kids, the latter quickly changes the subject.
• Oh, Crap!: Gabby, when agents show up at her door to arrest her.
• Overly Long Name: Gabby's is revealed to be Gabriela Vela Nueve de los Santos Ron Pablo Jones. Justified in that Hispanic names can get rather lengthy, but it also has elements that aren't strictly Hispanic.
• Parental Bonus: This show's got plenty of 'em.
  • During a flashback, Grandma Gabby vandalizes a statue of Josef Stalin by teepeeing it, angering many Soviets in the process.
  • When everyone enters the saloon to celebrate the elimination of unjust laws, Grandma Gabby asks for some “root beer” while making quotation marks with her fingers. Later, when Ethan tries some of that “root beer” himself, he correctly points out that it's not root beer... it’s just ginger ale.
• Parody Product Placement: "Wonky Wages" plays with this trope. Wonky's toy factory is an obvious parody of Willy Wonka, lampshaded by the kids. Gabby then uses this to segue into a fourth-wall-breaking advertisement for the Tuttle Twins online store.
  Grandma Gabby: [Wonky] will make us rich through merchandising. (to the audience) Everything you see in the next 20 minutes can potentially be sold as a toy! gasp Is that a Derek backpack?!
• Quoting Myself: When Gandhi explains why revenge is wrong, he quotes himself by saying, "An eye for an eye make's the whole world blind." This immediately gets lampshaded by Ethan.
• Race Lift: The twins are half Cuban in the cartoon, whereas they were white in the books. This was done so that Grandma Gabby could share her personal experience living under a communist regime that still exists today.
• The Reveal:
  • Karrine works as some kind of junior agent for an organization that is waiting for the opportunity to arrest Gabby and take her wheelchair and other inventions.
  • The reason Gabby didn't want the twins going off to explore the future is because of the dictator of society in the year 3000 AD. It turns out the dictator was none other than Gabby herself as a young woman.
• Rise of Zitboy: In "Roll for Power," the twins briefly get stuck as their Crisis & Creatures characters. They undergo a powerup that puts "tricorn" Ethan through an adolescent stage, complete with a face full of acne.

Ethan: So this is what puberty is like.

• She Is All Grown Up: Mr. Tuttle wasn't the most attractive boy when he first met Mrs. Tuttle. But she sure thinks he is now.
• Shoe Slap: Averted. The first potential weapon Gabby (a Latina grandma) pulls out to fight her younger self in "Fight for the Future" is a slipper, but she throws it away and pulls out a plunger instead.
  • Played straight in S2E1. Gabby uses a sandal to slap FDR's hand with a firm, "No!" when he attempts to grab her wheelchair.
• Shout-Out:
  • Dark Dumpster Derek is an obvious homage to Batman.
  • Season 2's premier, "Needs, Rights and Flamingo Fights," is chock full of pop culture references, and the season looks to have plenty more.
    • The episode opens with two factions of butterflies snapping their fingers before initiating a fight.
    • Lyle's description of his trek to find food comes straight out of Indiana Jones.
    • John Locke allows Derek to play a literal game of Operation on one of his patients.
    • At one point, Grandma Gabby spits out her dentures and clacks them together to imitate horse hooves on pavement.
    • Grandma Gabby and Derek go on a shopping spree at Hot Gothic. While there, Gabby directly name drops Tim Burton.
    • While stranded on Flamingo Island, the twins and Keith manage to catch Nemo, Dory, Marlin and Wilson.
    • Keith calls one of the killer flamingos a "clever girl."
    • Emily tells Copernicus that they never thanked the woodland animals for their help. He responds with, "And you'll never have to," before being carried off by a "cape" of butterflies.
  • The second episode of season 2 has an obvious parody of the Teenage Mutant Ninj-
    Gabby: No! Trust me, niños, it's a very important legal distinction.
  • In the same scene as the above, a rat is seen in the sewer about to indulge in a delicious meal. Sadly, his attempts to eat are thwarted repeatedly, much like a certain saber toothed squirrel.
• So Proud of You: The twins get one of these from Mr. Tuttle in "Roll for Power" when they stand up to the city council in opposition to a proposal that would bail their dad's cafe out in the short term, but give the local government too much power in the long term.
• Straw Hypocrite: One example from "When Laws Give You Lemons". Besides the fact that those "tax collectors" are really just the bandits in disguise, they claim that collecting cows from Carla will help create new jobs and help the poor and the needy, but they barely hide the fact that they're just plain greedy. Either way, nobody else was happy about the government taking other people's property and giving it to someone else.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: While the characters are traveling through time and space in "War of the Worms", elevator music is heard.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Just when Sherriff Winkles had the two bandits at gunpoint, he takes the time to give the twins a little speech about how the government's job is to protect the rights of their citizens. ...then the bandits escape while his back was turned. This was lampshaded by Carla.
  Carla: Is this like, a "teaching moment"? ...or did you want the bandits to escape?
  Winkles: Uhhhh... (in a defeated tone) it was a teaching moment.
• Take That!: The show, made for children, shamelessly pokes fun at communists. And Congress. And Facebook. And even past presidents. No one is immune.
  Gabby: Vamonos! We have places to go, people to see, communists to offend!
• Time for Plan B: The bandits were first seen attempting to steal a cow. When that doesn’t work, they disguise themselves as law-abiding tax collectors to legally confiscate Carla’s cows. But then when the law gets turned against them, they decide to revert to their original plan: take the cows away by force, except this time, using violence.
• Trauma Button: Whatever you do, do not ask Ethan about his dead Goldfish, or even mention the word "fish" around him.
• Toilet Humor:
  • In the first episode, we learn that Gabby went back in time to the French Revolution and borrowed a bidet from her dear friend, Frédéric Bastiat. What really makes this example work is that she confuses the bidet for a salad bowl, which she uses it for.
  • The lemonade that the twins kindly give to Karrine at the end of the first episode.
    Karrine: (nonchalantly takes the drink) Thanks. But it's warm.
    Ethan: Eh, whatcha gonna do?
  • In one episode, Grandma Gabby brings Queen Elizabeth I from the 16th century to show her self-flushing toilets. She's absolutely giddy over the "chamber pots" that empty themselves.
• Turn the Other Cheek: In "The War of the Worms", Gahndi explains to the Tuttles that he and his people have suffered under the oppression of the British for many years. But despite all the horror that he went through, he nevertheless chooses to respond, not through vengeance, but through peaceful protesting. When Emily asks him how he responds to cruelty with pacifism, he says it's because he follows the principles of Hinduism, the teachings of Jesus Christ, and of course, The Golden Rule. He also says he is still able to find peace in doing good toward others, even when they're not doing good toward him in return. As for the story's conflict, this trope was necessary to break the Cycle of Revenge.
  • On a Tuttle Talks video concerning the same episode, Karrine asks creator Daniel Harmon about this trope and points out its unpleasant moral implications; that we should just allow our enemies to continue to hurt us as we choose not to fight back. Daniel responds that there are indeed times where self-defense is a better option, like how we should preserve our rights to life, liberty, and property.
• Worth It: During the first episode, the main characters suddenly run out of knowledge juice and end up trapped in the western age. This was most likely due to all the bathroom stops Gabby made because she drank too many slushes. Nevertheless, Gabby says it was worth it.
• Would Harm a Senior: At the end of "Pencils, Pirates, and Ice Cream People", Karrine spots a security camera that most likely recorded Gabby warping to another time with her wheelchair. She then pulls a Slasher Smile, smacks her fist into her other palm, and says "Gotcha! Grandma." Then someone who was looking at her misinterprets this as this trope.
  Girl: Are you gonna punch a Grandma?
  Karrine: What?
• Would Hurt a Child: 25-year-old Gabby tries to use a machine to forcibly brainwash the twins and Karrine before learning that the twins are her own future grandchildren.