YMMV / Asterix

• Accidental Aesop: The narrative generally lionizes the simple country life lived by the Gauls as honest and fulfilling while denouncing the metropole-dwelling Romans as greedy, ambitious and decadent and depicting their striving for power, wealth or glory as nerve-wrecking, superficial and in the end meaningless. However, in Asterix and the Cauldron, Asterix's and Obelix's ignorance about monetary and economic matters proves almost fatal when they, in spite of their supernatural abilities, continuously fail to earn money when they suddenly have to. While it could be argued that they never would have slipped into that situation to begin with if not for the deceit of a greedy rival chieftain, the message the average reader most likely takes from the story is, especially on rereads, that at least some skill with money and trade is indeed useful, even if you live outside the economic hotspots. Note, though, that while the Gauls do engage in bartering (preferably with menhirs), they do use sesterces in the village. It's just that Asterix the warrior/hunter/adventurer does not need economic skills and Obelix isn't bright enough.
• Alternative Joke Interpretation:
  • Is it possible that Obelix is aware that he's fat, but hides it for unknown reasons or use it as an excuse to punch Romans? Notably, when a Gaul, ally, or neutral character is the one to call him "fat", he typically acts as if there is no fat person around, whereas when a Roman or an untrustworthy person does this he reacts by beating the crap out of them.
  • Some fans have theorized that Cacofonix's singing is actually good, but the reason why the Gauls can't stand it has to do with the fact that Cacofonix adopts a more "modern approach" to his skills, often citing that he sounded bearable in the Asterix and the Big Fight movie and that Justforkix (who's ahead of his times in tastes) liked Cacofonix's singing.
• Americans Hate Tingle: Virtually every kid in Europe grew up reading Asterix comics but the popularity of the series really hasn't managed to translate across the Atlantic (in fact, if you were an Asterix fan in North America, chances are your family had immigrated from Europe very recently and one of your relatives had introduced it to you).
• Audience-Alienating Era: At the very least, Asterix and the Magic Carpet through to Asterix and the Falling Sky are considered markedly weak. Some fans take it even further, lumping everything created after Rene Goscinny's death (not counting Asterix in Belgium, which was half-complete at the time of his death) into this category.
• Awesome Art: Even when the plots are lacking, Uderzo's drawings make for good reads. The Art Shift in Asterix and the Class Act even shows his versatility. Following Uderzo's departure from the series, Didier Conrad has faithfully stuck to that style so far.
• Awesome Music:
  • The 1992 arcade game has a very amazing soundtrack fitting the franchise' humorous tone. Notably "Wave", "Save Falbara", "Asterix in Gauls Village", and "Asterix Vs. Caesar".
  • The XXL games similarly follow suit with incredible soundtracks. Some standouts include tracks such as The Roman Empire, Normandy Fight and Boss Fight.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment
  • A straight example in the animated Asterix and Cleopatra with the singing bath scene which serves no real purpose (except maybe animated Fanservice).. "When you're eating well, you're well..." The Dutch version of this film even cut this entire sequence. And you know what? You don't miss it all, nor do you ever have the feeling a part of the story is missing.
  • The live-action film Asterix and Obelix Meet Cleopatra has one where the Relax-o-Vision provides an educational film on crawdads instead of the fight.
  • Asterix and the Falling Sky may qualify as a Bizarro Episode due to everyone's memories being erased.
  • A curious two-panel scene in Asterix in Spain. It depicts Julius Caesar publicly pardoning a fat red-headed barbarian chief he has just been parading before the Roman public, after receiving much applause from everyone (including the prisoner!). While fairly amusing in providing the excuse for a few puns about having a "captive audience", it has no relevance at all to the story, and seems to serve no other purpose than being a page filler (it served as the last two panels on the page it appeared on).
    • The French version, while still somewhat random, has a far more Caesar-relevant pun: when asked what Caesar is doing, one of the bystanders explains "il affranchit le rubicond" ("he is freeing the red(head)"). Which is almost the same, in French, as "il a franchi le Rubicon" ("he has crossed the Rubicon"). Which is, of course, one of Caesar's most famous historical deeds, and the one that started the civil war that Caesar is now returning victorious from. Still a bit of a random scene, but far more relevant.
    • In the German translation, Caesar shows that he likes men that are fat.
  • Quite a few scenes in the animated film The Twelve Tasks of Asterix are far more absurd and surreal than the comic strip (a man throwing a spear around the world, a man running faster than the wind, skull tennis, the subway scene while Asterix and Obelix are in the Cave of the Beast, the circus scene...)
  • In Asterix and the Magic Carpet, the characters have arrows shot at them while flying over the city of Tyre, and nobody ever explains why. (It makes more sense in the French version, where "Tyre" is pronounced the same as "tire", meaning "shoot", i.e., shoot arrows.)
  • Asterix and the Actress has a very odd segment in which Asterix starts jumping twenty feet in the air, yelling in excitement, swimming out to sea, and being rescued by a dolphin. The context doesn't help much.
• Can't Un-Hear It: French viewers are so accustomed to the comedian that dubbed Asterix in original versions of Animated Adaptation, Roger Carel, that by the time the first-live action movie premiered, a little girl interviewed on her way out the theater remarked, "Asterix does not have his usual voice".
• Critic-Proof:
  • Asterix & Obelix Take on Caesar didn't wow critics, but it dominated the French box office in 1999 with nearly 9 million admissions (The Phantom Menace had "only" 7.3 million meanwhile).
  • The third live-action film, Asterix at the Olympic Games, was critically panned and won several Gérards Awards (French equivalent of the Razzie Awards), and finished second grosser of 2008 in France with 6.8 million cinema admissions behind the 20 million of Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis.
  • The fifth film, 2023's Asterix & Obelix in the Middle Kingdom, has been panned for pretty much the same reasons as the third, and yet it pulled the biggest launch for a French film in 15 years at the French box office with 466703 admissions, and the seventh in history for the country.
• Critical Dissonance: The live action movie adaptations' critical reception ranged from well received to trashed. All of the movies were box-office successes but the second movie (Mission Cleopatra) is the only one well received (and none of the others reached its massive success in France), due to its particular brand of humor by Alain Chabat. The third (The Olympic Games) and fifth (The Middle Kingdom) are both considered as the worst.
• Designated Villain: On paper, Romans are the villains, The Empire that tries to defeat La Résistance. However, in some stories (and save for the cases of big bads or The Heavy such as Tortuous Convolvulus), Romans are not really trying to do even that, they are just doing their own business, with the Gauls simply getting in the middle of it. It helps that the majority of legionaries are nothing more than punchclock villains, poor conscripts suffering from the Empire's expansion, anyway.
  • In Asterix and the Goths, the Romans are worried because the Goths have invaded Galia. Both Goths and Gauls pass the frontier and roam in the forest, and the Romans are completely incapable of doing anything about it.
  • In Asterix at the Olympic Games, the Romans simply want to send a champion to the games and get the glory. When the Gauls find out about the games, they send their own champion, under the pretense that they are allowed to go as Romans because Gaul is part of the Roman World (despite the village obviously resisting the occupation). Asterix even give his reward to the Roman champion of a nearby camp as a Pet the Dog moment.
  • In Asterix and the Normans, they saw a fight in the beach between Gauls and Normans, and just tried to return to the fort and avoid any problem. The new "by the rules" legionary however was more zealously antagonistic and had them return there and try to stop the fight... with the expected results.
  • In fact, the roles are reversed in Asterix and the Laurel Wreath, where Asterix and Obelix go to Rome and carry out a complex plan to steal Caesar's laurel wreath. The Romans did not do anything, and the Gauls wanted to steal from them. And not for an honorable reason: just for Vitalstatistix to give a Take That! to his brother-in-law. The death sentence on Asterix and Obelix does not count either: Asterix himself pled to be sent immediately to the Circus for punishment of their crime (dishonoring a slaver and a slave owner)... thinking that Caesar would be there, with his laurel wreath.
  • Numerusclausus in Asterix and the Picts. The poor guy was just a civilian Roman trying to make a census of the village and the Gauls kept beating him up. They were no signs that the census would have been used for military purposes. That being said, they finally give him lenience at the end of the book, by suggesting the one surefire method to have a headcount: the traditional banquet.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Some fans prefer to entirely ignore the books written by Uderzo and only read the ones written by Goscinny.
• Franchise Original Sin: Uderzo's run as writer of the comics started out very similarly to Goscinny's run, but with a few immediate shifts in character — first, that Uderzo had a more satirical and parodic sense of humour than Goscinny, who was more into absurdity and anarchy; second, that Uderzo liked writing more complicated, cinematic adventure plot-lines, where Goscinny tended to prefer plots that were in the background to the character's antics; and third, that he pushed fantasy elements further into the foreground, where the setting up until that point had been a Purely Aesthetic Era version of Ancient Rome with one really important fantasy element. This is not considered to detract from the quality of most of the early Uderzo-only books, like The Great Divide, Asterix and Son, and The Black Gold (with a very un-Goscinny James Bond parody subplot), although they are definitely different in tone, but books like The Magic Carpet (where the Dreadful Musician suddenly develops a magic power necessary for the plot to work) and Obelix All at Sea (Obelix gets turned to stone, reverts to childhood, and they all go to Atlantis) are often criticised for being straight fantasy adventures with not much in the way of humour. Then there was Asterix and the Secret Weapon, a book about a Straw Feminist taking over the village and defeating a Roman legion of female soldiers by distracting them with clothes and shoes. This would culminate in Asterix and the Falling Sky, a pulp-style science fiction story involving the village being invaded by aliens representing the Americans and the Japanese, which was intended as an Author Tract about the influence of manga and American comics on Franco-Belgian Comics but which was not considered by readers to work on that level (mainly because Uderzo briefly skimmed through one manga before writing it). Fans widely derided it as the worst thing in the world, and Uderzo retired before writing another book celebrating Asterix's 50th anniversary. Both this book and the one made by another duo Uderzo allowed to take over the series found a better reception.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: It is a gigantic bestseller across Europe, not just in France. It is the bestselling comic of all time in the continent. Beyond just France and Europe, it has sold well enough to not only be translated in every major language across the world, but in total raw volumes sold, its just behind One Piece as the comic book series with the most copies sold.
• Growing the Beard: The first three books are decent enough, but Goscinny and Uderzo were still clearly trying to find their feet. The fourth, Asterix the Gladiator, saw a major improvement in both artwork and writing, along with Julius Caesar becoming a much more fleshed-out and interesting villain. A slight slip-back then happened with Asterix and the Banquet, a solid enough story but one that ultimately didn't do much to advance the story or characters, and had little appeal to non-French readers due to it being a cross-country tour of France with the heroes collecting local delicacies. And then came Asterix and Cleopatra, which saw the artwork and writing both taken to the next level (along with properly introducing Dogmatix), and is still widely considered the best book in the whole series.
  • Jean-Yves Ferri and Didier Conrad got this with their first Asterix stories.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Asterix and the Black Gold has the Romans burning all the petroleum in Palestine so the Gauls can't bring it back home. The book was written in 1981, ten years before an actual military-induced oil fire in the Middle East (the Iraqi troops setting fire on Kuwait's reserves as they left following The Gulf War). There's also a scene where oil is thrown off a boat and hits a bird. While it's a reference to a spill on the French coast in 1978, the seagull covered in oil ends up evoking the Exxon Valdez in 1989 and the Deepwater Horizon 19 years later.
  • Asterix and the Chariot Race features a masked chariot racer named "Coronavirus", who competes in a race across Italy. Roughly three years after its publication, the COVID-19 Pandemic occurred, with Italy being one of the first countries outside Asia to be affected (and one of the hardest hit by it), and Uderzo himself died during the pandemic (albeit from unrelated cause).
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In Asterix and the Great Crossing Asterix and Obelix arrive in a wild land that is later implied to be Liberty Island. Many years later, The Mannahatta Project showed what New York really looked like at the time.
  • Asterix & Obélix Take on Caesar wouldn't be the only time Caesar wound up wearing a mask, as it later happened in Asterix and the Chariot Race (albeit willingly, this time).
• Ho Yay: Let's see, Asterix and Obelix go pretty much everywhere together, have a dog together, and seem to be the only unmarried men in their village. Even for (supposedly) Heterosexual Life-Partners, that's awfully close.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "These Romans are crazy!", and pretty much every possible variation. This quote reached this status in A LOT of languages.
  • "You fell in it when you were a baby" is used to explain someone being passionate about something, especially if they took up the interest at an early age.
  • The opening narration is often seen when dealing with La Résistance (One little village/country/planet/starship still holds out, etc.).
  • Permit A 38 from The Twelve Tasks of Asterix, at least in Germany and France, to mock the complexity and the slowness of the bureaucracy.
  • From the second movie, the "I don't believe in good or bad situations..." speech.
• Moral Event Horizon: Brutus crosses it when he attempts to murder a baby Caesarion so he can ensure his place as Caesar's true heir.
• No Problem with Licensed Games: The Konami arcade game. The Asterix & Obelix XXL series was also pretty well received, especially the second game's numerous Shout-Outs. On the other hand, some fans of the original comic book found the story and humor really weak for an Asterix game and too focused on pandering to the gamers crowd.
• Older Than They Think: It is often believed in France that Roger Carel was the first to voice Asterix, in 1967's Asterix the Gaul. That's technically not true — Guy Piérauld (the most iconic French voice of Bugs Bunny himself) was the first, in a 1960 radio play. This makes Piérauld The Pete Best, as Carel remains the most iconic French voice of Asterix by a long shot.
• Only the Creator Does It Right:
  • For most fans of Goscinny, the quality started to drop with the albums written only by Uderzo.
    • Some critics of Jean-Yves Ferri and Didier Conrad say this of Uderzo's solo work too as Uderzo was Goscinny's partner and co-creator of Asterix.
  • The animated films Asterix and Cleopatra and The Twelve Tasks of Asterix were those held in highest regard by fans prior to the 2010s ones written and directed by Alexandre Astier. Both were written and directed by Goscinny and Uderzo themselves.
• Padding: Some of the later Uderzo albums have this, such as the Wacky Wayside Tribes in Asterix and the Magic Carpet, as well as the aforementioned scene in Asterix and the Actress.
• Parody Displacement: The pirates are a parody of another French-Belgian comic book series, Barbe-Rouge, with the same characters reused. This series has become quite obscure nowadays, even in France and Belgium, and owes recognition mainly due to Asterix.
• The Problem with Licensed Games:
  • Asterix, an Atari game released in 1983, which was actually nothing more than just a slightly modified version of the game Taz which featured the Looney Tunes character Tazmanian Devil. As such, it has practically nothing to do with the actual comics.
  • Asterix and the Great Rescue, as demonstrated by the Joueur du Grenier and WhoIsThisGit. Not only are the levels filled with fake and schizophrenic difficulty, but the time limits are exceptionally strict, leaving almost no room for error. On Hard, it becomes borderline Platform Hell.
  • The PS1 game adapted from the first live-action movie is a terrible Party Game filled with annoying sounds (also reviewed by Joueur du Grenier).
• Quirky Work: The series sometimes gives off this impression to people unfamiliar with French culture and Roman history. In particular, Asterix in Corsica and Asterix and the Banquet have a lot of jokes about French regional stereotypes, which people outside of France tend to find bizarre.
• Sequelitis:
  • The albums Albert Uderzo wrote alone after the death of René Goscinny are often considered inferior. His first three solo works (Asterix and the Great Divide, Asterix and the Black Gold and Asterix and Son) are generally seen as decent or at least readable, but after that the quality of the books went gradually downhill, and hit rock-bottom with Asterix and the Falling Sky.
  • Among the animated films, Asterix and the Big Fight is usually considered the weakest of the animated entries.
  • Asterix at the Olympic Games and Asterix & Obelix: The Middle Kingdom are generally considered the worst of the live-action films.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel:
  • The second live-action film, Asterix & Obelix: Mission Cleopatra, is usually seen as much better, funnier and closer to the comics than Asterix & Obelix Take on Caesar. Only a few comics fans would disagree (and Albert Uderzo himself back in the day).
  • Critics were kinder to Asterix & Obelix: God Save Britannia than they were to Asterix at the Olympic Games.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Erix, the pirate captain's son, could be an interesting character, but he never appeared after Asterix and the Banquet and had no characterization there either. He only appears as a counterpart to Eric, the son of Barbe-Rouge.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Asterix and the Chariot Race had Asterix and Obelix take part to a race all around Italy, visiting the places, meeting the various peoples... And completely missing to mention Cremona, the oldest recorded example of Undefeatable Little Village... As a Roman outpost besieged by Gauls.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Some albums and adaptations are like this, despite the story being set in the 1st Century BC:
  • Asterix in Corsica references a scandal almost no-one remembers now, even in France.
  • Obelix and Co. features a character based on Jacques Chirac back when he was Prime Minister of France, in 1976; the resemblance is not so striking today.
  • Asterix in Britain has Anticlimax say they started to dig a tunnel under the Channel, but it'll take a while until it's finished. When the album was written, it was doubtful that the Chunnel would ever be finished.
  • Mentions of Alesia (where Vercintegorix made his Last Stand) being followed by shooty replies that nobody even knows where it is are allusions to a heated controversy between historians over its location that was widely relayed in French media for several decades but has since become obscure. Today, the debate is considered settled by a majority of historians thanks to new archaeological digs and the advance of aerial photography confirming the hypothesis of the site being located near the town of Alise-Sainte-Reine, and the angry reactions from the comic's characters have entered Genius Bonus territory.
• Values Dissonance:
  • While all nations and ethnicities are portrayed as caricatures, the portrayal of black people with oversized lips would NOT be allowed in a new work today, but in the 1960s this was not treated as an issue.
  • The black pirate is a Butt-Monkey even for the other pirates, while the original Baba of the Barbe-Rouge comics (which the Asterix pirates are based on) was a Book Dumb ex-slave, but nevertheless a brave, resourceful and respected man.
  • Flaturtha from The Mansions of the Gods shows the Fair for Its Day aspect. Apart from the big lips, his leopard loincloth has a tail, which would be unacceptable today. On the other hand, he is the leader of a multinational group of slaves, he is smart enough to bargain with the Romans instead of trying to escape, and he talks the Gauls into letting the Romans finish one building so the slaves will be free.
  • Asterix and the Secret Weapon, which was originally released in 1991, was a parody of the feminist movement. The handling of this may seem incredibly inappropriate and sexist to some modern readers. However, it's worth noting that the majority of the book actually portrays the Gaulish women advocating for their rights in a fairly positive light. What might be more problematic is the appearance of the female Roman legion, and the fact that the Gauls defeat this legion by opening an ersatz shopping mall, which instantly makes the Roman women forget all about their militaristic duties. Many still find it Actually Pretty Funny.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Flaturtha from The Mansions of the Gods can give the impression of being female because all other characters whose names end in -a are female. (His name is actually based on the historical, and male, Numidian leader Jugurtha).
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?:
  • The series was interpreted by some as a promotion of nationalism by defending traditional French values and to encourage fighting off foreign invaders.
  • On the other hand, the Gaul village resisting the Roman Empire and Asterix helping local populations against the Romans can be seen as a form of anti-imperialism.
  • Additionally, there are several socialist undertones, as the Gaul village doesn't have any currency and instead has a sort of community-based functioning, and the series regularly takes jabs at people who are motivated by wealth, power and influence, most blatantly in "Obelix & Co.", which was deliberately written as a criticism of consumerism.
• What Could Have Been: In a now-deleted section of the official Astérix website, it was revealed that Konami's programmers in Japan wanted to create a level in the 1992 arcade game where Astérix and Obelix fought ninjas. The French license holders vetoed the idea.
• Win Back the Crowd: While arguably not among the best albums, Asterix and the Picts by the new writing team has been praised as a fortunate return to form after Uderzo's late work, especially Falling Sky. Asterix and the Missing Scroll has been received even better as it returns to political satire.
• Woolseyism: Essentially, the editors know they have to get top-notch translators for Asterix: it's a famous series, known for its puns and other such gags that need good translators. Plus, Uderzo and Goscinny lent full creative freedom to the translators to make all the changes that were necessary, as long as the comedic intent was maintained.
  • The much-loved English adaptation of the original French dialogue added new jokes whenever they wouldn't translate well — e.g. the characters' names. Due to the extreme levels of wordplay in the French originals, Woolseyism is essentially the only option. The English translators have said that because they could not translate the puns, they compromised by making sure that every page has the same number of jokes as the French original. The English adaptation even changed some drawings if a reference was too difficult for English readers to understand.
  • It wasn't just the English translation. Nearly all of the translations were extremely well done. In Italian, Obelix's famous catchphrase "these Romans are crazy!" was translated as "Sono pazzi, questi Romani" (lit. "They're crazy, these Romans."). What makes it doubly funny is that this spells out the acronym SPQR, better known as the identifier of the Roman Senate.
  • In the European Spanish versions of the stories, not only are the names mostly unchanged (since Spanish is a Romance language just like French), but the translation is absolutely hilarious and does use many Spanish expressions in place of the French ones. It says something that there are quite a lot of quotes from the books that reached full Memetic Mutation in Spain.
  • The same goes in the Latin American Spanish editions, for obvious reasons, with a sole difference: Until the 2020s, all the Spanish translations of the comics were done using the European Spanish version instead. Then, Hachette Livre, a Mexican publisher, created a new translated version for Latin American viewers. However, there's a catch: The translation is full-chock with Mexican slang, causing another problem for non-Mexicans to understand most of the humor from the translation.
  • Even more so in the case of the Catalan version: since Catalan sounds like a mix between Spanish and French, it's probably the most faithful translation, since lots of puns can be translated more or less directly.
  • And let it be known that the Portuguese, both European and Brazilian, version is also excellent!
  • And so is the Swedish one, and... let's just save some time and say this goes for pretty much all versions, okay?
  • The Italian dub of the movies has the Romans speaking in Rome's dialect.
  • However, there was also the terribly Macekre'd German "translation" Siggi und Babarras, where the translator replaced the light-hearted humor with heavy-handed political Author Tracts. Goscinny and Uderzo quickly withdrew his publication rights. Later, a new (and real) German translation was started, with the same high quality of other translations.
  • The original Dutch translation wasn't very good either. The translators missed a lot of puns and allusions and translated many lines straight. Even the names of the cast were kept identical, instead of inventing new names. Since the late 2000s the entire series has been retranslated in a much better way.
  • Hungarian translations zig-zag this. On the whole they're brilliant, but character names (outside of Asterix, Obelix and of course actual historical figures) often change between albums, cartoons or movies, and some are less creative than others. Probably the best example of a Woolseyism is the entire dub of the live-action Asterix and Obelix Meet Cleopatra, where everyone speaks in rhymes and the puns are ramped up to ridiculous levels.

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