YMMV / Galavant

• Adorkable: Chef awkwardly dances to King Richard's songs, and is pretty endearing when around his crush Gwynne.
• Arc Fatigue: Isabella's storyline in the first half of Season 2, where she's nothing but a straight-faced Damsel in Distress killing time until Galavant can save her. Until it comes abruptly to an end and she ends up as badass and angry as you'd expect..
• Awesome Music:
  • Alan Menken wrote the songs, AND is an executive producer. Are you surprised that it has some? Special mention has to go to the opening number. Apparently, ABC also loves the song, because every single trailer for an ABC show has a little ditty of its own, set to the same tune, with some rather nifty variations.
  • "Love is Strange." Not only is this when Galavant and Isabella confess their feelings for each other, the musical accompaniment has some of the most complex orchestration heard in the soundtrack.
  • The new opening for Season 2, "New Season (aka Suck It Cancellation Bear)," also is good. Justified; the song tries to replace the catchy precedent main theme In-Universe. It has a Dark Reprise also.
  • The tune of the main theme comes back for the awesome "Galavant Recap" where the Jester breathlessly and flawlessly recaps the last few episodes for everyone, to the point where both armies applaud him in-universe.
• Base-Breaking Character: Some people find Wormwood to be an annoying distraction from the already well-liked villains from Season 1, while others love him for his campy mannerisms and genuine devotion to wedding planning.
• Cliché Storm: And sometimes it's on purpose. What particularly stands out is Chef and Gwynne's love duet, which invokes all the clichés associated with The Dung Ages (squalor, disease, losing nearly all your kids, you die at age 32, etc.).
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • Richard's treatment of Valencia after conquering it would be appalling, if he wasn't so adorably confused about why his new subjects don't seem to like him.
  • Isabella thinking Galavant has abandoned her due to essentially a crappy cell phone connection would usually be pretty groan-worthy, except what she thinks he says is so over-the-top horrible and contrived (including a cow showing up out of nowhere just so she'll think he's calling her a cow) that it becomes a hilarious parody of these kinds of Poor Communication Kills shenanigans. It also helps that's lampshaded.
  • Sid accidentally impaling Galavant is so sudden and contrived after everything seemed to be going so well that it's just hilarious.
• Cult Classic: Despite a strong start at its premiere, Galavant never really crystallized as a successful "filler" show, and at only 8 or 10 episodes a season, it's not even the longest cult classic. However, the premise, the twists, the great music and fun characters all make for a combination that created a modest fanbase.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Vincenzo, the king's tiny beleaguered chef, is a scene-stealer from episode 1. Towards the end of season 1 he gets his own sideplot and a love interest in Gwynne, and their morbidly sweet duets are some of the best moments in the show.
  • Also especially popular from the get-go is Gareth, thanks to his Comically Serious tendencies and over-the-top masculinity.
  • "Weird Al" Yankovic as a monk who's sworn a vow to only communicate through song.
  • The King and Queen of Valencia are well-liked for their hilarious comical asides and Deadpan Snarker tendencies.
• Genius Bonus:
  • Richard is conned into buying a lizard, thinking it's a dragon that will soon grow to full size. Thing is, he's actually right, as it's a Pogona, whose common name is the bearded dragon. It turns out not to be a con at all in the end.
  • The prop used for the Sword of the One True King is, appropriately enough, a replica of Charlemagne's sword.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The numerous jokes about Richard's lack of physical prowess became pretty wince-inducing when a couple years later, Timothy Omundson suffered a major stroke that left him physically disabled.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Joshua Sasse and Kylie Minogue started dating after meeting on set, and were briefly engaged (until early 2017). Gives the whole "Off With His Shirt" number a whole new subtext, doesn't it?
  • Both the show's major actresses were given roles on other ABC shows after the cancellation, with some striking similarities to their Galavant characters. Karen David plays a princess who's lost her kingdom and searches for outside help to get it back on Once Upon a Time, and Mallory Jansen plays a coldly unemotional android who gains access to dark magic on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D..
  • The episode title "A New Season, aka Suck It Cancellation Bear!" They couldn’t outrun it a second time...but three years later, the Bear was killed off when TV By The Numbers shut down and removed the archives.
  • The first verse of "If I Were a Jolly Blacksmith", considering Timothy Omundson is going to play Hephaestus, a blacksmith god, in Percy Jackson and the Olympians.
• Ho Yay: Gareth's Undying Loyalty plus Richard's The Dandy/Camp Straight tendencies often push the duo's Odd Friendship into this territory.
• Hollywood Pudgy:
  • Gareth makes several jokes at the expense of Isabella's weight. This is lampshaded by King Richard, who points out that she's a hundred pounds soaking wet. It's then subverted when Gareth mentions that the "really skinny" women he likes are "really, really unhealthy." In fact, he also likes really fat women. He is just not fond of anything in-between.
  • Relatedly, there's not much difference between Galavant in-shape and Galavant out-of-shape. Basically his shirt is looser.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Richard, whose parents just ignored him, only giving their love and respect to his older brother, Kingsley.
  • Madalena in "Bewitched, Bothered and Belittled," where she learns the pair of Alpha Bitches she turned herself into such a monster to gain the acceptance of still have nothing but cruel contempt for her. She ends up singing a rare completely earnest and joke-free song about how painful it is.
• Magnificent Bitch: Madalena was a peasant woman and Galavant's girlfriend who dumped him to marry King Richard and become his queen. Successfully collaborating with Richard in luring Galavant into a trap on the pretense that she’s Richard's prisoner, she overthrows Richard with the help of his treacherous brother Kingsley, only to stab Kingsley In the Back, becoming the sole monarch of Valencia. When she learns of Galavant, Richard, and co. escaping her imprisonment and their whereabouts, she uses her vast army to declare war on them, while also obtaining the magical powers of the Dark Dark Evil Ways to ensure her victory. Only losing to Richard's Sword of the One True King, Madalena never loses her dark charm and only expands her ambitions to conquer the rest of the world, becoming the apprentice of the Dark Evil Lord to master her powers boldly claiming that nothing will stop her now.
• Memetic Mutation: "I super believe in Tad Cooper."
• Moral Event Horizon: Even after everything else she's done, Madelena truly goes beyond the pale near the end of Season 2 when she sells her soul for demonic powers, something even Gareth is against.
• Nightmare Fuel: The magic brainwashing tiara. The way Isabella's entire personality changes the instant she puts it on is quite creepy, and not helping is that her parents don't care at all, at least at first. And when they do express concern, Wormwood gets her to throw them both in the dungeon.
• The Scrappy: Kingsley, with critics noting that Rutger Hauer didn't seem to quite get the show's tone and plays the whole thing completely seriously. Plus, he's the primary reason we don't get any closure in the first season.
• Spiritual Licensee: This is the closest we're going to get to a TV series of Spamalot.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: Many songs on the soundtrack are clearly inspired by previously-recorded music.
  • The melody of the title song is lifted directly from one of Menken's own works, specifically If I Can't Love Her from the stage version of Beauty and the Beast
  • "Finally" is clearly inspired by "Summer Nights" from Grease.
  • "Do the D'Dew" is an evil version of "The Silly Song" from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs with a bit of "Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo".
  • "My Dragon Pal and Me" is a lot like the theme song from That Girl.
  • The Angry Mob Song "Today We Rise" is very similar to "Do You Hear the People Sing" from Les Misérables. Lampshaded when Sid starts waving a giant red flag out of nowhere halfway through.
  • "When Will That Day Come" (the duet Richard sings with his younger self in the final episode) is similar to "Getting Tall" from Nine (Musical).
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • After a terrific introduction showing her Action Girl and Undying Loyalty sides, Roberta spends the rest of Season 2 doing nothing but mooning over Richard, even sitting out the climax entirely.
  • Meanwhile, Gwynne and Chef do almost nothing in season two (the actors were too busy to be locked in for the whole season), and Isabella spends half the season in captivity and a few more episodes brainwashed and bewitched. Even Galavant doesn't really do much of anything. All said, Richard is one of the only characters who can be said to have a distinctive, identifiable arc to him.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: "It's a fairy tale spoof with upbeat musical numbers made by the man who composed the songs for Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame? Surely, it will be a fun romp for the whole family to enjoy!" Or so thought many subsequently surprised parents prior to the show's first airing. This despite half the theme song being devoted to all the sex Madalena and Galavant were having during their relationship.
  Facebook commenter: I think I'm going to have to give my kids "The Talk" after this.

---