Do Not Do This Cool Thing: A major reason the franchise proved somewhat controversial in its heyday was that despite the whole message being about safety, the entire appeal of the toys and cartoons was that the characters could break every safety law imaginable, get into spectacular crashes and accidents, and then simply put themselves back together.
The Film
Esoteric Happy Ending: The dummies thwart Junkman and rescue Dr Zub, but Junkman gets away with the Torso 9000 they'd been trying to reclaim and the last few seconds reveal that Dr Zub lost a chunk of his mind. Presumably these loose threads could be resolved offscreen, but it's still a low note to end on.
Junkman looks just like Jinzo and has a name that suggests he should be in Yusei Fudo's deck.
A decade or two after the series, a toyline named "Junkbots" was released by Hexbug.
Narm Charm: There's lots of low-hanging puns and pratfalls, all of which manage to stay funny because everyone is an artificial life-form designed to take punishment.
Nightmare Fuel: Junkman. All the villains are made of scrap parts that make them look more menacing than the crash dummies, but the fact that Junkman's head looks like a normal dummy with augmented eyes and mouth adds an extra layer of creepiness to his design.
Special Effect Failure: It's an all-CGI cartoon from the early 90s and it shows. Especially glaring are the walking and running movements, where it's clear that the character models are just being moved from one spot to another with their legs moving on a cycle.
Unfortunate Character Design: Slick has a black torso with a red star emblazoned across his chest, making him unintentionally look like a Soviet advocate.
The Woobie: Junkman's minions. They're made from discarded car parts, so their intelligence is pretty dismal. Seeing them fail at following basic instructions could easily be seen as the robot equivalent to brain-damage.
The Game
The Problem with Licensed Games: The NES game based on the series, where one of the two characters you control is on a runaway unicycle for some reason, your only weapon does nothing but freeze enemies for a second, and it's possible to have your head knocked off thereby reversing all your controls, is usually regarded as one of the more frustrating licensed games on the system. But even that doesn't compare to the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis versions which are both Nintendo Hard for the wrong reasons (No continues, terrible controls, etc). In comparison, the Game Boy game (which instead of being an action-platformer, is made up of quirky minigames of the dummies working as stunt doubles or quality control at a munitions plant) tends to be regarded a bit more favorably.
was released by Hexbug.