YMMV / The Young Ones

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Vivian is, indeed, a man's name, though it's generally one you'd find among Victorian upper crust toffs, which is to say the exact opposite of Vyvyan.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The show just loves these. Doesn't matter what episode you pick, there will be one in there. For example, 'Summer Holiday' has a pair of ants discussing the idea that humans can build bridges, and asking how they can get them into the disco. Another moment has a garden gnome coming to life, saying that it wasn't a gnome Rick just killed, but a hippie. In some ways, this show is one long B.L.A.M.
• Crosses the Line Twice - Vyvyan's Amusing Injuries and violent exploits, several times over:
  • Loses his head after sticking it out of a train window. He later has an altercation with his headless body after it comes to find him.
  • This trope is essentially what makes the cricket bat scene funny.
  Rick: Ha! Missed both my legs!
  • Vyvyan's "row of collies" tries for this, but doesn't impress Mike.
  • Going outside and pushing the entire left wall of the house inwards by several feet in a fit of frustration after finding out that the VCR's cord is too short to reach the plug (and then smashing the window to get back inside).
  • Mike hitting a golf ball into the toilet while Neil's sitting on it, and Rick inadvertently catching it after he throws it back.
    • That....wasn't the ball he caught....
• Draco in Leather Pants: Vyvyan often gets this treatment in the existing fandom. As far as fanfiction goes, expanding on his hinted Dark and Troubled Past is a popular focus.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Vyvyan is often what people remember most about this show, due to his fairly explosive nature and vivid appearance.
  • Among Alexei Sayle's various roles, the South African Driving Instructor Vampire (a.k.a. Harry the Bastard) for not only being funny in his own right, but also central to the episode's storyline.
• Genius Bonus: In "Nasty", Vyvyan threatens to kill Rick, to which Rick sarcastically responds "What devastating repartee! Talk about Oscar Wilde!" Oscar Wilde named the younger of his two sons Vyvyan. Yes, that same spelling.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: While it's not a home that's become a shrine to Rik Mayall, an area in Hammersmith, London which has been used to film Bottom has become a shrine for Mayall, with people leaving memorials for The Peoples' Poet, and having him be celebrated for his work in both The Young Ones AND Bottom.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • While Neil was intended to be a hippy, nowadays he feels like a prediction of the emo subculture.
  • In "Boring", Billy Balowksi impersonates a Dalek. Alexei Sayle would later guest star in "Revelation of the Daleks".
  • In "Summer Holiday" God appears and says "You wouldn't expect me to be a woman now, would you?". Fifteen years later, Dogma was released.
  • Vyvyan's tirade against The Good Life was meant to mirror series writer Ben Elton's own affected disdain for the programme. Several years later, the Elton-penned pilot episode of Mr. Bean would guest feature Richard Briers, the star of The Good Life! Furthermore, Adrian Edmondson would later play Briers' nephew in If You See God, Tell Him.
  • In 2020, it was announced that Edmondson would appear on University Challenge for real, which made everyone think of "Bambi".
  • In "Bambi", it is revealed that the title character, who is the same Bambi from the Disney movie, had starred in a fictitious adult-themed sequel. In 2022, it was revealed that several Disney-adapted materials, including Bambi, would be made into adult-themed movies (though adapted from their source rather than their Disney versions).
  • The episode "Nasty" ends with the gang discovering a monster that was pursuing them was really a video store clerk asking them to return the video they rented.
• Misaimed Fandom: According to Ed Bye, the series was popular with the police despite constantly mocking them; a fact which upset Rik Mayall greatly.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Jerzei Balowski as a homicidal axe-wielding maniac in "Flood".
  • The "fifth housemate" seen in the backgrounds at certain points was intended to be this, but it doesn't stop it from being creepy nonetheless. Seeing moments of the series and then noticing a sitting person with incredibly long hair doing nothing comes off as if there's something from The Ring.
  • The incredibly creepy scream when Vyvyan gets decapitated in "Bambi".
• Once Original, Now Common: The show was considered anarchic and subversive in the early 1980s. In comparison with their successor Bottom many of the violent scenes (Vyvyan destroying something or hitting Rick over the head) can seem rather tame today.
• One-Scene Wonder: The shirtless, unhinged laughing guy who randomly appears to deliver a short monologue in a transitional cutaway scene in "Cash". He only ever appears in that one part but his "You won't catch me with me trousers!" line is considered one of the most memorable from the entire show.
• The Problem with Licensed Games: Yes, really. A game appeared in 1984 that was boring and unintuitive to say the least. Being an Unwinnable Obvious Beta didn't help.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • A very young Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson and Ben Elton as the Upper-Class Twit team in "Bambi". Elton also appeared in the pilot episode as the host of Nozin' Aroun'.
  • Hale & Pace as the grave-diggers.
  • Lenny Henry as the fascist postman in the last episode, "Summer Holiday".
  • Jennifer Saunders as Helen Mucus ("Time") and again in "Interesting" as Sue, and Dawn French as the Easter Bunny, the Christian who barges into the house before getting squashed by a giant sandwich and Satan.
  • Paul Merton makes a very brief appearance as a yokel in "Time".
  • Robbie Coltrane as a bouncer in the second episode, "Oil", and a Victorian scientist in "Bambi".
    • He's also the pirate Captain Blood, in "Time".
  • Tony Robinson as Dr Not-The-Nine-O-Clock-News.
  • From that show we have Griff Rhys Jones alongside Mel Smith as 'Bambi' Gascogine and the front-desk guard respectively.
  • Norman Lovett (the first Holly in Red Dwarf) owned the penny arcade across the road. Chris Barrie (Arnold Rimmer in the same series) appeared as a Napoleonic sailor in an animated painting.
  • Spaz, the Grange Hill student from "Sick", is played by Perry Benson, who would later be best known for playing Henry Livingstone in You Rang, M'Lord?.
  • A man in Hell from "Boring" is played by Robin Parkinson, who would later be best known for playing the third LeClerc in 'Allo 'Allo!.
  • The list goes on. It was chock-full of cameos, all of which are listed in the end credits of the last episode.
    • In fairness very few of them were cameos as such because with a few exceptions (Terry Jones, Smith and Jones, Lenny Henry) all of the extras/one-shot characters were then-unknown fellow comedians from the London alternative comedy scene, in particular the Comedy Store. It says something for the ridiculous fertility of that late-70s early-80s scene that it germinated so many television and film careers that in retrospect this has one of the most ridiculously star studded-casts in television history.
• The Scrappy:
  • Mike isn't anywhere near as popular as Rick, Vyvyan, or Neil, which you can argue is mainly due to being the more mundane of the lads (Rick being an arrogant egotist, Vyvyan being insane, and Neil being whiny but endearing). But Alexei Sayle's various roles appear to be most disliked, possibly because of how they come out of nowhere and proceed to interrupt the episode for several minutes. It's telling that "Bambi" is considered to be the funniest episode and has Sayle's role shorter than usual.^note (Somewhat paradoxically, "Nasty", which gives Sayle the most screentime of any episode in the series, is generally considered in the top three or so episodes; this may be because Sayle's character, the "vampire" actually is important to the plot, instead of just eating up screentime to little effect)
  • Rick is probably this in-universe, as well as Neil to some extent.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The series features several bands performing who have since split up or lost members, like Dexys Midnight Runners or The Damned. And then there is an episode, "Nasty", where the characters rent a Video Nasty. Most viewers nowadays have probably no clue what a "video nasty" is supposed to be. They also have jokes parodying the over-the-top PIF about reckless driving, made by a now-defunct government board and the T.V. Times' old advertising slogan, a hamster named after the Special Patrol Group, which was disbanded in 1987, and outdated tech, from their analogue T.V to the VCR to The BBC going off air after 10 o'clock, to Rick's record player and Vyvyan's Ford Anglia. (Although if anyone in the modern day would be enough of a self-satisfied hipster to own a vinyl record player, it would be Rick.)
  • In the first episode there is a brief mention of Morecambe and Wise. Today, in a time where both men are long since dead, older viewers who watch The Young Ones say that they have trouble accepting that both were still with us in 1982.
  • Similarly, the episode in that season with the Buddy Holly joke where Mike finds him trapped in the loft room. Holly was only 22 when he died and would only have been 45 by 1982 but people's mental image of an "older Buddy Holly" is the elderly man he would have been by the late '90s and '00s.
• Values Dissonance: Ben Elton later regretted Rik's casual use of "spaz" as an insult when he started working with disability charities.
• The Woobie: He might be whiny and a bit dim, but it's easy to feel bad for Neil, especially when the other lads react with utter indifference when he tells them it's his birthday.
  • Jerkass Woobie: A case can be made for Vyvyan. His mother treats him like shit and he doesn't have a dad.

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