In "It's Valentine's Day, Johnny Bravo!", Johnny is set up on a blind date by his mom. While he scoffs at this, Johnny meets the woman and they hit it off because they share many interests. Although it ends semi-tragically, there are two takeaways:
If you want to get a date, seek out people who share your interests rather than hitting on random strangers.
Don't turn down a blind date out of pride. Your mom might know what she's doing.
Adorkable: Carl is a nerd who has weird hobbies and has built some strange inventions, but he's a Nice Guy who's very enthusiastic and outgoing that it can be difficult to not like him regardless.
Alternative Joke Interpretation: One episode has a primitive tribe sacrifice Johnny to their volcano goddess, who wants virgins. Johnny is rejected almost immediately. Whether this is another joke about how obnoxious he is or an indicator that he's not actually a virgin is debated.
Ass Pull: In "A Date With An Antelope", the antelope's overly attached ex-boyfriend turning out to be the crab that Johnny was just served at a fancy restaurant. Even with Rule of Funny applied, it still happens with no foreshadowing whatsoever. From that same episode, the head waiter at the restaurant just so happening to be a college friend of the antelope's father (allowing her in when the restaurant has a strict "no animals" policy).
"The Happy Haunted Sunshine House" is considered one of the show's best moments and has even become a fan-favorite chase song among Scooby-Doo! fans.
In one episode, where a little Mexican village enlists Johnny to save them from terror, we get a little musical interlude as Johnny is brought into the village on the back of a donkey, while a harmonica and guitar rendition of Peter and the Wolf plays.
"That's All You Need to Know," a warm and fuzzy love song from "It's Valentine's Day, Johnny Bravo!" It's an original song written by the show's creator, Van Partible, and performed by Joey McIntyre and Rachael Lampa.
Badass Decay: At the beginning of the series, Johnny was able to successfully wrestle a crocodile. By the time the third season rolled around, even children could beat him in a fight.
Little Suzy. Some fans think her interactions with Johnny where she either annoys him with her cuteness or works off of his stupidity with her intelligence are hilarious, while others think they're boring and don't really give the show that much mileage for jokes and episode plots.
Carl. He's either liked for being a great Foil to Johnny and thinks his relationship with Johnny is a better gateway for jokes and plot ideas than Johnny's relationship with Little Suzy, or he's disliked for his annoying voice and for his moments of upstaging Johnny.
Pops. Most fans like him for his relationship with Johnny, the amusing injuries he puts Johnny through, and his Large Ham moments. Others found him a boring character whose moments of taking advantage of Johnny and serving unsanitary food to his customers at his diner makes him come off as unlikable.
Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: In the episode "Double Vision", Johnny prepares to do a dive into a swimming pool. Immediately after he jumps off the diving board, an enormous pink elephant pops up on screen, shouts "CANNONBALL!", runs to the pool, and jumps in, just in time to empty all of the water and give Johnny some Amusing Injuries. The elephant then screams, "DUUUDE, THAT WAS EXTREMEEEEE!' and leaves. There's absolutely no build-up to the moment, and it's never mentioned again.
Bizarro Episode: The episode "I, Fly" has Johnny having his head swapped with a fly after stepping inside one of Carl's teleportation pods, causing Johnny to spend the entire episode being a fly. And the episode ends with him, the fly, and Carl all swapping bodies and then they casually eat lunch at Pop's Diner, which irises out on the fly as it lampshades how strange the episode was.
Season 2 and Season 3, which were the seasons made without Partible. Some liked the larger cast of central characters, more accessible humor, and a downplayed amount of pop culture references that keep the show from being dated. Others hated Johnny's Flanderization, increased amounts of slapstick, and the Art Shift. Pretty much the only things fans agree on was that Suzy's redesign looked hideous.
The celebrity appearances can be this as well. They're either welcome cameos with funny moments, or painfully unfunny and in the case of certain celebrities like Vendela, Farrah Fawcett, and Donny Osmond, severely dated.
Can't Un-Hear It: The voice Tom Kenny uses for Carl is very similar to his SpongeBob voice (particularly his pre-movieSpongeBob voice) resulting in a lot of fans thinking of SpongeBob when they hear Carl's voice.
Cargo Ship: In the episode "Candidate Johnny", it's revealed that Carl took a rubber ducky as his date to his high school prom.
Character Rerailment: Seasons 2 and 3 amped up Johnny's stupidity significantly. When Partible returned for Season 4, Johnny was rewritten to be closer to his Season 1 personality.
Johnny:(after the Big Bad is unmasked and he gives a You Meddling Kids speech) Man, do all the supervillains just sit around watching Scooby-Doo? (Aside Glance; flirty tone) Hi, Velma.
The Sensitive Male is one of the more popular characters due to his Schoolhouse Rock! parodies voiced by Jack Sheldon, and for coming off as a great Foil to Johnny.
Sergeant Trixie from "Full Metal Johnny" has a good following according to YouTube.
Some people remember Chronos, Master of All Time!(Dramatic Thunder) to this day (despite him only really having two appearances).
Estrogen Brigade: Ironically, in spite of Johnny's womanizing habits, the show has a rather devoted female fanbase who love it for its deconstruction of the Chivalrous Pervert trope, and find Johnny an overall amusing character due to his womanizing habits making him a Butt-Monkey.
Friendly Fandoms: Johnny's love of striking ridiculous poses and off-the-wall stories ended up endearing the character to quite a number of fans of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. Johnny is often compared, both due to appearance and personality, to Jean-Pierre Polnareff.
Johnny Bravo became extremely popular in India, to the point of becoming what essentially amounts to a cultural icon and his name being used a slang term for anything that's considered cool/hip/trendy. Cartoon Network Asia took notice and eventually made Johnny Bravo Goes to Bollywoodexclusively for India.
The TV movie also aired in Australia and New Zealand, which hints that the show may have quite a following over there too. It's also one of the favorite Cartoon Network shows of an Australian YouTuber named PhantomStrider, who has frequently referenced the show in his videos (particularly his LiveStrider videos).
The show is very popular in Latin America, almost as much as India, much like in Australia and New Zealand, the TV movie even aired in Latin America, and the title character also has a one off blink it, you'll miss it, cameo in the CN Latin American series Villainous.
Harsher in Hindsight: A harsh one regarding the Hungarian dub of the show. The voice actor for Johnny Bravo (who, if you haven't heard, is an Elvis Presley-esque sexist trying to score with women) got arrested in 2012 for sexual violence charges.
The image of the Schoolhouse Rock! character handing a woman the letter D — as in, give her the "D".ExplanationIn context, he was singing a song about courtesy with the lyric "Show that girl that you really give a D" (as in "darn").
"BUY OUR TOYS!"ExplanationThe episode "20,000 Leagues Over My Head" has a scene of Johnny watching Clam League 9000, a Show Within a Show consisting of a mash-up parody of Dragon Ball and Pokémon. The Goten/Ash Ketchum Expy notably yells "Buy our toys" three times at the end of the scene, each shout more manic than the last. This is frequently used to make fun of Merchandise-Driven works.
My Real Daddy: Despite Van Partible being the creator (and showrunner in the first and fourth seasons), many have credited writers Butch Hartman, Seth MacFarlane, and Steve Marmel, as well as Gary Hartle and Kirk Tingblad (showrunners in the second and third seasons) for the series' success over Partible. This is especially true with the fourth (and final) season, which involved Partible's return, but not the aforementioned writers or producers and was poorly received.
Nausea Fuel: Pop's Moon Palace is this in terms of the food and the kitchen.
"I, Fly" is an obvious parody of The Fly (1958), but still has its share of unsettling moments. The fly Johnny ended up switching bodies with even says at the end "This was a strange and disturbing episode."
Only the Creator Does It Right: Part of the divisive reaction to seasons 2 and 3, until Partible came back on board for season 4 as that season wound up killing the series.
Periphery Demographic: While the entire show has plenty of adult fans, the first season in particular grew quite a following among adult fans for its Parental Bonus jokes and tons of pop-culture references. So much so that some of those adults fans weren't happy when seasons 2 and 3 were made more child oriented and had the pop-culture references removed.
Seasonal Rot: As the final season of the series, season 4 got hit with this pretty badly as Carl and Pops (who were established cast members in the previous two seasons) became Demoted to Extra, characters like Little Suzy became very generic, the comedy such as the Self-Deprecation and slapstick was very underwhelming, episode plots were dull and dragged on because of the longer running time, and celebrity guest stars became so much more frequent compared to the first season, with the episodes generally focusing more on them instead of Johnny himself (including the poorly-received series finale with Shaquille O'Neal). What's especially ironic about this is that other Cartoon Network shows that went through seasonal rot such as Dexter's Laboratory and The Powerpuff Girls involved the departure of their respectivecreators. This show's seasonal rot involved the return of creator Van Partible; meanwhile, the seasons without his involvement were well received. Part of this may be due to Partible being stuck with a different writing staff compared to the first season, as key writers such as Butch Hartman, Seth MacFarlane, and Steve Marmel had moved on to otherprojects.
The scene from "Date with an Antelope" where Johnny checks himself in the mirror and then calls the police to report a "handsome guy in his house" is one of the show's most remembered scenes.
The "Happy Haunted Sunshine House" chase scene from "Bravo Dooby-Doo."
"T is for Trouble" has Johnny's training montage accompanied by a soundalike to "Eye of the Tiger" by Survivor.
Johnny's song about his high school crush Sandy Baker in "The Time of My Life" sounds an awful lot like it's copying "Da-Doo" from Little Shop of Horrors.
They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Despite critical acclaim for seasons 2 and 3, purists were unhappy with Johnny suddenly dipping in intelligence. This is also true with the (also different) fourth season which, despite Partible returning, flopped miserably and ended up killing the series.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Both Carl and Pops end up getting this treatment in the last season, where their roles were heavily reduced to them just making cameos (though Carl at least still had speaking roles). Since they were both major characters in the previous two seasons and with nothing they are and what they do feeling out of place in Partible's format of the show, he could have made them both work and probably even given them good roles to make them funny and useful to the episodes' plots. Unfortunately, they got reduced screen time, their character traits (particularly Carl's scientist traits) were removed, and they were hardly used at all in the last season.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The episode concept of "Witch-ay Woman" where Johnny is turned into a woman to put him in the shoes of all the women that he is always harassing is not only a great way to give him a cathartic reality check how uncomfortable women get when men like him bothers them, it would also come off as a great aesop about treating women with respect like respecting their boundaries and treating them like human beings. But unfortunately Johnny doesn't really end up learning anything from the experience except "women are smart and men are dumb."
Johnny's womanizing may be Played for Laughs, but it's at Johnny's expense as it almost always ended with him on the receiving end of some physical pain (usually from the woman herself), making the message quite clear that that kind of attitude is no way to earn someone's affections.
Even disregarding that, Johnny ended up the way he is due to a (horribly misguided) attempt to give his then-girlfriend the man he thought she deserved, rather than who he was back then. He also has nothing but respect for women, treating them all equally and accepting rejection rather than getting upset or blaming the woman. He also loves his mom to death and is willing to help others not for a chance at a date, but because it's the right thing to do. Despite his bad behavior due to not knowing any better, Johnny does legitimately love women and wants the best for all of them.
"The Sensitive Male!" shows how the titular character the episode is named after is actually a manipulativeJerkass, who is using fake sensitivity in order to win over women. At the end of the episode when his true nature is revealed (and Johnny rats him out to other women, while also calling him a jerk), he is tied up and carried away by them to be given further punishment. Thus giving us a relevant message to this day about how faux nice guys can be just as bad as (or even worse than) their macho meathead counterparts.
The Woobie: Johnny is this at the end of "It's Valentine's Day, Johnny Bravo!", where he finally manages to win the heart of a girl who actually likes him and has a lot in common with him named Heather Asplund, to which ends with Heather turning out to be a spy who had to cover her tracks by erasing Johnny's memory and thus preventing Johnny from making her a part of his life. While Johnny receiving some of physical punishment for his womanizing ways or losing to hang onto a girl altogether is usually very funny, this is the one where it was the exception and came off as one of the show's biggest tear jerkers and probably the biggest loss for Johnny.
Writer Cop Out: The Valentine's Day special "It's Valentine's Day, Johnny Bravo!" has Johnny finally managing to find a girl who not only likes him, but has a lot in common with him named Heather Asplund. The ending has Heather revealed to be a spy who had to erase Johnny's memory to cover her tracks, thus they cannot be together. This came off to fans not only as a Status Quo Is God, but a very cruel one at that since Johnny and Heather seemed very happy together that having it end with Johnny once again failing to hold onto a girl came off as way too mean-spirited towards Johnny, especially when it was on his own birthday.
