Zeke's Pad is an animated TV show and is a Canada–Australia co-production between Bardel Entertainment, Flying Bark Productions, Star Farm Productions, and Leaping Lizard Productions in association with Seven Network and YTV.
Zeke Palmer is an imaginative artist and skateboarder who lives with a weird and wacky family. His Pad is an amazing electronic gadget that is a mobile phone, PDA, GPS, MP3 player and a drawing tablet all rolled into one. Zeke's pad has a unique glitch: anything he draws comes to life. Being a creative artist that he is, Zeke is constantly drawing and making his drawings come to life. But he learns that for every action there is a reaction, and things don't turn out the way he imagines.
Tropes in Zeke's Pad:
- Accidental Athlete: In "Gender Render", Maxine discovers that Zeke (currently in the body of a girl) can run surprisingly fast — but only when chasing after ice cream trucks.
- Acquired Situational Narcissism: In "The Big Picture", Zeke draws himself as the star a reality show. Soon, his ego gets the best of him, and he begins to direct his family on how to portray themselves, eventually replacing them with better actors. This causes his family to stop talking to him.
- Alliterative Name: Maxine Marx
- Amazingly Embarrassing Parents: Zeke's father Alvin often embarasses Zeke's friends.
- Annoying Younger Sibling: Rachel often bugs Zeke, especially with her theatrical monologues.
- Art Attacker: Anything Zeke draws on his pad comes to life. He can use this for attacks, and in the opening credits is shown using it to stick a toilet plunger on to an annoying dog's muzzle.
- Art Initiates Life: The titular Pad. Unlike most examples of this trope, the pad doesn't usually bring the exact subject of Zeke's drawings to life, but rather causes the events symbolized by the drawings to happen; for example, a drawing of a snowy landscape covers the entire Earth in snow, fulfilling a wish to have a snow day and delay a test. This even applies to abstract concepts—when Zeke crosses out a drawing of a person's hands being crossed behind their back, a symbol of lying, people lose their ability to lie and only say what they truly think.
- Balloon Belly: In "You Art What You Eat", Zeke gains one after eating an entire room full of pancakes.
- Be Careful What You Wish For: The basic moral of the series (along with 'There are no shortcuts'). Whenever Zeke uses the Pad to create something he wants, it almost never works out like he thinks it will. Relaxing his mother's cleaning rules turns her into an even more tyrannical Pigpen. His perfect pet becomes a menace to life, limb, and property. Trying to think like a girl turns him into a girl. And so on.
- Brain with a Manual Control: In "A Little Sketchy", Zeke and Jay enter Rachel's brain and control it. They make Rachel look like an absolute fool by making her do animal noises, walk into the wall, and say inappropriate things.
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: In "King of the Pad", Zeke calls Jay in the middle of the night, leading to a Split-Screen Phone Call. As Jay sits up, he smacks his head on the barrier separating the two.
- Cannot Tell a Lie: After making himself king in "King of the Pad", Zeke discovers that his subjects are afraid of him. In an attempt to rectify this, Zeke strips everybody of the ability to lie. This backfires hideously when a mob forms with the intention to dethrone him.
- Captivity Harmonica: Zeke's dad plays a harmonica when they are trapped inside the snowbound house in "The Artful Dodger". It gets stuck to his lips.
- Chained Heat: In "Drawn Together", Zeke and Jay get stuck together after the former turns them into positive and negative charges, apparently unaware of the nature of magnetism.
- Christmas Every Day: A variant in "Drawn Out Holiday": after Zeke wishes not to return to school, his family celebrates holiday after holiday every day, even if they don't make sense calendar-wise. In addition to major holidays like Christmas and St. Patrick's Day, they also celebrate more obscure holidays such as Talk Like a Pirate Day and Martial Arts Day.
- Circling Birdies: Zeke sees circling pancakes twice after mishaps during gym class in the series' first episode. Zeke had eaten a lot of pancakes for breakfast, resulting in numerous slips and falls during gym.
- Coincidental Accidental Disguise: In "Art is Bigger Than Life", the eight-foot-tall Zeke accidentally gets spilled with paint, causing people to think he is a monster. He looks like The Amazing Bulk.
- Contrived Coincidence: At the beginning of "Brush with Love", Zeke witnesses several unrelated events that make him believe his parents want to divorce.
- Crazy-Prepared: In "Artful Dodger", it's revealed that Jay is well-stocked and prepared for all kinds of natural disasters.
- Disney Death: In "Portrait of a Young Artist", Zeke is turned into an old man and is believed to be dead for a moment.
Of course, it turned out that he was only sleeping. - Does Not Know His Own Strength: In "Art is Bigger Than Life", Zeke accidentally turns into an eight-foot-tall massive muscle bound freak. He breaks things, rips off doors, and is generally misunderstood.
- Drama Queen: Rachel. Being a theater performer, this is expected.
- Dub Pronunciation Change: The French dub alters the pronunciation of Rachel ("ray-chul")'s name to "rah-shell", which is the French pronunciation of that name.
- Dysfunctional Family: Alvin is too focused on his music, Ida is Obsessively Organized and practices favoritism, Ike bullies his younger siblings, Rachel gets away with almost anything, and Zeke can't act without thinking of the consequences.
- Extreme Omnivore: Sketch from "Fetch a Sketch" eats normally inedible objects such as furniture and fences.
- "Fantastic Voyage" Plot: In "A Little Sketchy", Zeke and Jay enter Rachel's brain.
- Fat Camp: In "You Art What You Eat", Zeke is sent to a fitness camp to whip him in shape and lose the Balloon Belly he gained after eating a room full of pancakes.
- Fountain of Youth: In "Portrait of a Young Artist", Jay manages to help Zeke draw himself younger following his brush with Rapid Aging before it is too late. However, he ends up rapidly getting younger.
- Game Show Appearance: In "Luck of the Draw", Zeke and his family compete on Brain and Brawn, a game show that involves trivia questions and obstacle courses.
- Gender Bender: In "Gender Render", Zeke tries to console Maxine but she tells him that he just wouldn't understand what it is like to be a girl. He tries to change his mind into that of a girl, but instead accidentally changes his body into a girl's.
- Growling Gut:
- Zeke's bloated stomach is constantly gurgling and growling in "You Art What You Eat" because of all the pancakes he's eaten. As in, an entire room's worth of pancakes.
- On the episode "A Little Sketchy", Rachel's stomach growls due to how nervous she is about the play she's going to be starring in.
- Happily Married: Zeke's parents, Alvin and Ida Palmer. So much so that his parents not getting along is one of Zeke's greatest fears. When he thinks they are drifting apart in "Brush with Love", he attempts to use the magic Pad to put things right, and just ends making everything much, much worse.
- Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Every episode title is a play on words relating to the visual arts.
- Interspecies Romance: Sketch, a dinosaur-like hybrid creature, and a platypus. Their only shared characteristic is how weird they look.
- Invisible Jerkass: In "Family Portrait", Zeke decides to have the whole house for himself. He erases himself from a family photo, turning himself invisible, then passes himself off as a ghost to scare his family away.
- Living Statue: In "Unstill Life", Zeke wants to enter a sculpture completion, but due to his bad sculpting skills, he decides to draw a picture of a famous lost statue called The Joseph. Unsurprisingly, it comes to life.
- Love Potion: In "Brush with Love", Zeke draws himself as Cupid, trying to get Ida and Alvin back together with his love arrows.
- Macho Disaster Expedition: In "Picture of Paradise", Zeke and Jay go on a last-minute camping trip as a ruse to stalk Maxine to her summer camp. They try (and fail) to impress her, and when they decide to help her with a navigation exersice, they get lost themselves.
- Meaningful Name: The Smartly family from "Luck of the Draw" is a family of geniuses.
- Miraculous Malfunction: The eponymous pad's ability to rewrite reality based on what Zeke draws is a glitch, as shown in the opening sequence.
- Mix-and-Match Critters: Sketch, the ideal pet Zeke creates in "Fetch a Sketch", is a is very weird looking creature, with a hyena's jaw, feathers, fins, and other weird parts. It bares an uncanny resemblance to the dinosaur Concavenator.
- The Music Meister: Zeke becomes this, but only to himself, in "Wherefore Art Thou". In order to audition for the School Play (a musical adaptation of Romeo and Juliet), he gives himself a perfect singing voice. However, this causes him to sing everything he says.
- Neat Freak: Zeke's mother Ida has extraordinarily strict cleaning rules. In "Clean Slate", Zeke turns her into The Pigpen, only to discover this is even worse.
- Only Known by Their Nickname: Ezekiel Palmer, Isaac Palmer, and Jayden Fritter.
- Palette Swap: Several background characters use recolored models of named characters, most obviously Maxine.
- Passionate Sports Girl: Zeke's crush Maxine. She is on the relay team, loves skateboarding, and camping and hiking. In "Gender Render", it is revealed that she she gets up at 5 a.m. every day to train.
- The Pigpen: In "Clean Slate", Zeke turns his mother Ida, who is usually a Neat Freak, into her complete opposite. She takes her no-cleaning rules extremely strictly, and whoever is found doing a tiny bit of cleaning (e.g. moving a piece of paper to find something) is sent to the dreaded CR, the clutter room. The room is designed to break anyone of their cleaning habits.
- Playing Sick: In one scene from "King of the Pad", Maxine pretends to have a cold to stay away from Zeke and his bodyguards.
- Rapid Aging: In "Portrait of a Young Artist", Zeke gets tired of having restrictions because he is young, so he decides to draw himself older. This causes him to age ninety years in six hours.
- Rewriting Reality: Some of Zeke's drawings affect people and things around him. For example, a drawing of his ninja-inspired Original Character "Zeke of Fury" not only turns him into the character himself, but it also turns his family into ninja companions.
- Showdown at High Noon: In "Quick Draw", Zeke decides to draw a robot version of himself to do his chores for him. After the robot rebels and traps Zeke in detention, Zeke escapes and lures the robot into a back alley for a classic western style showdown. Much to his surprise, the robot also has a magic Pad, and the showdown becomes a literal Quick Draw, with each them attempting to draw faster on their Pad than the other.
- Snowed-In: In "The Artful Dodger", Zeke draws a snowstorm to delay his science test. It ends up freezing the entire world.
- Springtime for Hitler: In "A Little Sketchy", a miniurized Zeke and Jay take control of Rachel's brain, so that she will blow her rehearsal for a minor part in a play, and thus not spoil Zeke's vacation. They make Rachel look like an absolute fool, bur her emotional performance winds up earning her the lead role.
- Stock Punishment: After making himself king in "King of the Pad", Zeke gets to put Ike in stocks – just for being critical of him.
- Superhero Episode: In "Drawing Conclusions", Ida loses her precious electronic organizer. The organizer is what keeps the house tidy and the chores assigned. To help her find it, Zeke draws himself as a superhero detective, Zeke Streak, complete with tight spandex and a mask.
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: When Zeke creates a snowstorm out of nowhere in "Artful Dodger", the Palmers had no time to do the necessary preparations (e.g. stocking up on food and water). This results in them being Snowed-In with no food, no heating, and no running water.
- Tampering with Food and Drink: In "King of the Pad", one of Zeke's bodyguards is poisoned testing Zeke's drink, making Zeke realize that his subjects are afraid of him.
- Title Drop: The final episode is called "Zeke's Pad".
- Toilet Humor: The series makes heavy use of this.
- Vicious Vac: In "Gifted Artist", Zeke's idea for the perfect birthday gift for his mother is a robotic vacuum cleaner... that goes rogue and eats (yes, eats) everything in sight.
- Wild Teen Party: In the final episode, Zeke remodels the garage into a teen hangout with a skateboard ramp and ice cream bar, in an effort to escape from his family. He enjoys the peaceful solitude, until every teen in town joins in on the fun — including his siblings. When the place gets too crowded, Zeke has to implement a guest list.
- World of Technicolor Hair: Every member of the Palmer family has different, unnatural hair colors. "Model Family" proves that this has been going on for at least a hundred years.
- Writers Cannot Do Math: One of the game show questions in "Luck of the Draw" is "236-7*6+25". The "correct" answer given on the show is 1,289, but the actual correct answer is 219. Ignoring the PEMDAS rule and doing each part of the operation one at a time, the answer becomes 1,399.
