YMMV / Putt-Putt

• Accidental Innuendo:
  • Level 69 of Balloon-o-Rama has pink balloons arranged in the shape of a heart, which soon fills up with white balloons.
  • The noises that the apatosaurus makes as Putt Putt drives to when scratching his itchy back for him are... questionable.
• Alternate Character Interpretation: Joked about in Pushing Up Roses' Let's Play of Goes to the Moon, where she (and her guests Paw Dugan and Todd in the Shadows) remark that Mr. Firebird sounds a little too happy when Putt-Putt gets launched to the Moon and suggest that the "accident" was really premediated murder.
  • Hilariously enough, a Dummied Out news report suggests the same thing (even saying he was arrested!)
• Angst? What Angst?: Owing to animation errors, Putt Putt has a tendency to keep his smile when reacting to bad news.
• Awesome Music:
  • The music from levels 111-120 of Balloon-o-Rama.
  • Don't forget the Crate Factory music from Dog on a Stick.
  • Go, Putt Putt from Enters the Race. Probably because it's a The Beach Boys-inspired song.
• Demonic Spiders: Virtually every enemy could qualify in Dog on a Stick without unlimited lives on, but the beach balls and the hedgehogs are the worst. The beach balls can only move downward, but they make up for it by moving exactly in the direction you never want them to, and the jumping-through trick mentioned below doesn't even work on them. They also infinitely spawn again once they fall, meaning you can't get rid of them. The hedgehogs are the fastest enemy in the game, and can actually outrun Pep himself, and since they don't hop straight up once before going to another space, you never know where they're going. They're also really difficult to get rid of on levels that have switches to trigger the appearance of platforms. While you can jump through them, they're likely going to come right back and get you anyway.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Rover and Mr. Firebird, to an extent. Both are well-liked characters, but they didn't receive much attention. Rover is a big side character in Putt-Putt Goes to the Moon, but his only appearances afterwards were working at an ice cream shop in Enters the Race and Pep's Birthday Surprise and attending the party at the end of the latter game. Mr. Firebird wasn't treated much better, as he only shows up in the beginning and end of Moon and Putt-Putt Travels Through Time, in the One-Stop Fun Shop storytime coloring book story A Visit to Mr. Firebird, and in the Tie-In Novel Putt-Putt: Lost In Time (he's also mentioned by Putt-Putt in Pep's Birthday Surprise, and his factory/lab is the setting of Balloon-o-Rama's Levels 21-30).
• Fridge Horror:
  • Every time you remove the nails on the road in Joins the Parade, more will be there when you get back. Who's leaving them?
  • A Dummied Out line from Goes to the Moon mentions Mr. Firebird facing criminal charges for sending Putt-Putt into space. Hence, he was likely in prison during the events of Saves the Zoo.
• Good Bad Bugs: In Dog on a Stick, if you jump towards an enemy at the same time it jumps towards you, you can go through the enemy. Especially useful in levels with one-square wide paths.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Tippity-top! (From the UK dub of Putt-Putt Enters the Race)
  • It's become something of a common joke to mention how Putt-Putt always "borrows" things and never returns them, or in some cases makes very far-fetched excuses (such as how he "left his magnet" on the shelf of a toy store). Heck, even an alumnus from HE joked about this on the Humongous Alumni Facebook page.
• Periphery Demographic: The back of Putt-Putt Goes to the Moon's packaging says outright that the games have adult fans.
• Older Than They Think: Few people are aware that Putt-Putt Joins the Parade and Goes to the Moon were originally on the MS-DOS and not Windows.
• Refrain from Assuming: It's actually called "The Zoo Song", not "Welcome to the Zoo", according to Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo's help file. Later material does refer to it as "Welcome to the Zoo" though, which leads to confusion on what the real name is.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The vegetable picking in Putt-Putt Enters the Race. It's incredibly slow, tedious, annoying, and the fact that nothing can be skipped does not help anything.
  • Having to send Pep away in order to talk about his birthday party in private in Pep's Birthday Surprise. Not only does it get incredibly tedious, but it also raises certain questions. For instance, why can't Putt-Putt just leave Pep with one of his friends who also owns a puppy?
• Sequelitis:
  • Putt-Putt Joins the Circus is considered a step down from the preceding games. It removes the alternate paths featured in previous game, meaning that the items have the same locations and solutions each playthrough, and the plot is essentially a repeat of the plot of Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo.
  • Putt-Putt: Pep's Birthday Surprise was the final game in the series, and was made after Humongous Entertainment was bought out by Infogrames, and is widely regarded as the weakest game in the series. The animation quality is much lower than the previous games, none of the voice cast returned, the alternate paths are still gone, the pacing is much slower than before, and many of the game's assets were recycled from Putt-Putt Enters the Race.
• Signature Scene: Saves The Zoo has the Topiary Creatures song, which is considered one of the most memorable parts of the game.
• Stock Footage Failure: Or Stock Audio Clip Failure in this case; when getting painted in Putt-Putt Travels Through Time, Putt-Putt's voice line "I look good" is pretty blatantly recycled from Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo. Unfortunately, it sticks out like a sore thumb even if you didn't know that because Jason Ellefson's voice had pretty clearly begun to mature by the time of this game so he sounds quite a bit younger compared to the rest of the dialogue when the line plays.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: In Putt-Putt Saves the Zoo, the music that plays in the calm spot reached from the rapids is based on "Dueling Banjos", as part of a Parental Bonus Shout-Out to Deliverance.
  • Also, in Putt-Putt Enters the Race, one could argue that the theme song shares many similarities to The Beach Boys' song, "Shut Down". The song structures for both are very similar, the vocals for "Putt-Putt" are Beach-Boys-esque, and both songs are auto-racing-related.
• Tear Jerker: Rover's story in "Goes To The Moon" about how he was abandoned by astronauts visiting in the '70s. The music doesn't help.
• That One Level:
  • The Cave (Levels 61-70) in Balloon-o-Rama marks the debut of regenerating balloons, which reappear multiple times after they've already been popped, causing the levels they appear in to drag out longer than usual. Level 69 is considered to be the worst level in the set, as it consists of nothing except for these regenerating balloons.
  • The Rocketship (Levels 101-110) has levels that take even longer, thanks to the regenerating balloons being combined with other mechanics including bumpers and pinwheels. Among this set, Level 108 stands out, as it has entire clusters of regenerating balloons guarded by a barrier of bumpers and pinwheels laid out in such a way that hitting any of them effectively becomes a Luck-Based Mission.
  • As for Dog On a Stick, Level 95 consists almost entirely of paths that are one block wide, and swarming with five hedgehogs, the fastest enemy in the game. There are some switches that can be used to make the platforms they're on disappear, but the hedgehogs tend to hog the switches for themselves, and unless the player can eliminate some of them, simply moving around the stage reliably becomes a crapshoot.