GG Bond (猪猪侠 - Pinyin Zhuzhu Xia) is a Chinese animated series that was created by Ben Gu and is produced by Winsing Animation, originally being produced by BlueArc Animation for its earliest seasons. The series started with a short film, GG Bond: Havoc in the Palace (猪猪侠之大闹皇宫), that released at a festival in 2005 before being made into a full-time series in 2006. It's been regularly airing new episodes since, accumulating over 1,000 episodes and seven movies as of 2022.
The series stars a young pig boy named GG Bond, a superhero who has a love of justice and food. He visits all sorts of locations and is placed into all sorts of situations that require his attention throughout each of the show's seasons, and works with a team of other pig people, consisting of gentle smart girl Phoebe, headstrong Super Q, resourceful genius Bobby, sleepy S-Daddy, and their leader, the often-confused inventor Dr. Mihoo.
A number of episodes have been dubbed into English, and the series has been aired internationally. The series has an official YouTube channel over here
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GG Bond contains the following tropes:
- Adorable Evil Minions: The one-eyed hand viruses serving the villain in Ultimate Battle don't look particularly harmful, and indeed, they actually help GG Bond and his crew by taking them through an elevator that's normally only for viruses.
- Alternate Universe: It's explained in Season 16 that each season takes place in a different version of the GG Bond universe, hence why the characters' personalities tend to be somewhat inconsistent from one season to another.
- Animal Facial Hair: In later seasons, anthropomorphic pig Dr. Mihoo has a beard.
- Animal Superheroes: The main heroes are a group of anthropomorphic pigs.
- Annual Title: The second season, Martial Arts 2008, is a bit of a variation in that the season actually premiered in 2007.
- Banana Peel: In Season 12 episode 5, GG Bond notices the city hasn't been cleaned and slips on a banana peel that's among the trash. He slides out of control, avoiding several obstacles in a row before flying over a city resident, slipping again on a watermelon slice, and then running into a traffic light.
- Bragging Theme Tune: The theme tune focuses on praising GG Bond's heroism, describing how he's "so much more than your average pig".
- Don't Try This at Home: An on-screen message reading something to this effect appears whenever the characters do something outside of their battle sequences that could be dangerous in real life, such as in Season 12 episode 5 when GG Bond traverses a busy street to save Zyra from being hit by a vehicle.
- Dub Name Change: S-Daddy is known as Xiao Daidai, or "Little Dull", in the Chinese original.
- Early Installment Character-Design Difference: The pigs were pudgier and far less cutesy-looking in the earlier seasons.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: The earliest episodes of the series, specifically Seasons 1 and 2, had 20-minute-long episodes instead of the standard 14-minute episodes it would grow into.
- Excited Title! Two-Part Episode Name!: A large number of episode titles have two parts to them, the first part ending with an exclamation mark.
- Faceless Eye: The virus tower in Ultimate Battle has a bunch of tentacle hands that attack GG Bond and his gang, all with large, single eyes.
- Fairy Tale Free-for-All: The fairy world city has multiple fairy tale characters inhabiting it, such as Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood and The Big Bad Wolf, and Sleeping Beauty.
- Gravity Is a Harsh Mistress: In a Season 5 episode, GG Bond emerges from a bathroom rocket flying through the air and doesn't notice for a few seconds that he's not standing on anything, only falling when he does realize he's in midair.
- Humanlike Hand Anatomy: The anthropomorphic pigs have four- or five-fingered hands (depending on the season) that look exactly like human hands.
- An Ice Person: The ice deer transformation used by S-Daddy can use ice attacks and projectiles against its enemies.
- Kid Hero: GG Bond and his teammates (not including Dr. Mihoo) are all eight years old.
- Living Toys: Season 5 takes place in a world of life-sized building blocks that is inhabited by minifigure-looking toy people.
- Medusa: She's seen in Season 8 episodes 25 and 26, with her turning two of GG Bond's teammates to stone with her vision before facing GG Bond himself in the latter of the two episodes.
- The Movie: The series has produced seven feature-length movies as of 2022. The specific movies' titles are, in order of the year they were first released, GG Bond: Hatching (2012), GG Bond and the Beanstalk (or simply GG Bond 2) (2014), GG Bond: Ultimate Battle (2015), GG Bond: Guarding (2016), GG Bond: Lollipop in Fantasy (2019), GG Bond: Dinosaur Diary (2021), and GG Bond: Ocean Mission (2022).
- Mushroom Man: In Season 13 episode 11, the gang discovers a mushroom they were grilling is sentient and spare it. The mushroom, Momo, turns out to be the only survivor of the mushroom people on Planet Dobudo, where the inhabitants lost their ability to produce spores. In the episode following that one, the pigs fight against a giant mushroom monster with a Faceless Eye and large mushroom hands.
- New Season, New Name: In the typical Chinese cartoon fashion, each season has a different subtitle appended to it. Just to name a few examples, Season 1 is called Magic Jurassic, Season 2 is Martial Arts 2008, and Season 3 is Adventure in the Future.
- Not the Intended Use: In the first episode of Season 12, Phoebe helps GG Bond rescue a bag of stolen goods from a thief. They then discover that it's a bag of records stolen from a video store, and that the owner lets his dog play with the records like frisbees. GG Bond questions if that's the reason why he even collects records to begin with.
- Numbered Sequels: The second movie is titled simply GG Bond 2.
- Playing the Heart Strings: In Ultimate Battle, a simple, saddening violin piece is heard playing when GG Bond cries over wanting to see his father again. A similar piece plays later when he looks over his memory album with Phoebe.
- The Power of Rock: In Season 12, Megaceros is seen playing a guitar that shoots projectiles to attack GG Bond.
- Quarter Hour Short: The standard episode length is 12-15 minutes or somewhere thereabouts. Originally, in Seasons 1 and 2, episodes were 20 minutes long.
- Really 700 Years Old: The Season 1 version of GG Bond gets sealed away in the Light of Hope, and 3,000 years pass by the time he's released, though he barely looks like he aged at all.
- Red Is Heroic: GG Bond's superhero outfit is red with yellow accents.
- Reptiles Are Abhorrent: Season 9 features a chameleon man as one of its villains.
- Rump Roast: In the first episode of Season 12, Phoebe uses a fire attack on a wolf thief, causing his bottom to catch on fire. He promptly starts rolling on the ground to put out the flame.
- The Smurfette Principle: Phoebe is the only female of the main team.
- This Is a Song: The full version of the English-dubbed theme song contains a short rap section that has the lyrics "GG's always going strong/That's why he's got his own theme song".
- Three-Point Landing: One of GG Bond's pieces of stock artwork depicts him in this pose.
- Title Theme Tune: Oh GG Bond, a hero for today! Oh GG Bond, he makes it all OK! Oh GG Bond, super in every way! Bigger than big, so much more than your average pig!
- Toy Time: Season 5 takes place in a village built out of LEGO-like toy bricks, with minifigure people inhabiting it.
- Trademark Favorite Food: GG Bond absolutely loves lollipops.
- Transferred Transformation: Originally GG Bond had all the powers of transformation for himself, being able to transform into a tiger, a bear, a crane, an ape, and a deer. Eventually, all the transformations got transferred to GG Bond's fellow teammates, with GG Bond keeping only the tiger one.
- Transformation Sequence: The characters tend to have extravagant transformation sequences whenever they morph into their stronger animalistic forms.
- Trash Landing: In a Season 5 episode, GG Bond falls from a rocket in the air and lands in a trash container.
- Voluntary Shapeshifting: In Seasons 7-9, the pigs have the ability to shapeshift into stronger animalistic forms, with GG Bond initially having all the transformations before they're spread throughout the team. GG Bond transforms into a tiger, Phoebe transforms into a crane, Super Q transforms into a bear, S-Daddy transforms into a deer, and Bobby transforms into an ape.
- Would Rather Suffer: In Season 12 episode 2, GG Bond demonstrates his singing skills, which turn out to be so awful that S-Daddy says that he would rather listen to cats screeching than hear GG Bond's singing.
