YMMV / The Tripods

• Awesome Music: The TV series featured a memorable main theme and score by Ken Freeman. Following the 2009 DVD release, an album of new music inspired by the unproduced third series was released, titled The Tripods: Pool of Fire Suite.
• Harsher in Hindsight: It's bad enough when we learn that Eloise's reward for winning the contest is to serve the Tripods in their City. It's even worse when we learn that she serves them as a stuffed specimen.
• Inferred Holocaust:
  • Realistically speaking, the fate of Hans in The City of Gold and Lead. He is alone and disabled on an island, that is NOT self-sufficient, with no means of traveling to the mainland. The Capped mainlanders have no reason to care about him or render assistance. It's painfully obvious that he will starve to death, and, given his expression as Will and Beanpole are leaving, he clearly knows it.
  • There is one in the Prequel as well. It is heavily implied that when the second wave of Tripods were destroyed, the Trippies surrounding them were slaughtered as well.
• Narm:
  • The orientation guide on Will and Fritz's first day in the Masters' city bears a strong resemblance to Freddie Mercury.
  • The Pink Parrot Disco Bar in the Masters' City, after a season and a half of medieval level villages and populations.
  • The Power Elite are the nuclear reactor technicians who wear Kung-Fu uniforms.
  • In early episodes, Will and Henry's misadventures in several towns resemble popular mental images of Frodo and Sam from the pre-Peter Jackson days.
• Serial Numbers Filed Off: The Tripods are inspired by the fighting machines from The War of the Worlds, as is the appearance of the Masters as giant tentacled heads.
• Spiritual Successor: To The War of the Worlds.
• Squick: When Ulf is running the security detail in the castle where Ruki is being kept prisoner in The Pool of Fire, Will notes how he often coughs into a polka dotted handkerchief. Later on he discovers that the handkerchief started out completely white.
• Values Dissonance:
  • The novels have almost no female characters at all, because at the time they were written it was generally accepted that girls would read books with boy main characters, but not vice versa. The TV series tries to compensate, somewhat awkwardly:
    • At one point in the first season, the three boys meet an entire family of girls, who all adore them and want to marry them, but the trio then leaves them behind.
    • In season two, a few female members of the Freemen take part in the plan to join the Games, but are immediately killed off.
    • Will and Beanpole encounter a couple of bridesmaids on their way to the Games, who are very eager to help the boys out, in exchange for a tumble!
    • Female Games champions are also chosen to serve in the city, but immediately segregated from the boys and not seen again. It's stated that female city servants perform only "cooking, cleaning, and nursing".
• WTH, Costuming Department?: The Power Elite's uniforms are mandarin style jackets with thick karate belts.

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