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"The town of Millville is in danger! Monsters and tropers are shoehorning examples into this page! I, Wendy Mercier, am here to stop them!"
Wendy, paraphrased version of the opening narration

Millville Mornings is a 52-episode animated Fantastic Comedy created by Mikuru Fan. Currently, this is mostly a dumping ground for my thoughts on playing with tropes.

Note: The episode numbers on this page are outdated. There are being replaced with titles or are being moved to the recap pages.

Works:

Games


Take a good long look at these examples. Mmm-hmm.

  • Adults Are Useless: The adults who appear in this show are either perverts, villains, or too incompetent to provide anything of use to the cast.
  • California Doubling: Lampshaded in an In-Universe movie that starts with the line, "Once upon a time, in a far away land within an hour's drive from Palm Springs..."
  • Cartoonland Time: The cast is able to visit Florida and Austria with minimal time or budget limits.
  • Chekhov's Gun: The Undo Transformation Gun appears very briefly next to the Female Transformation Gun in the scene where James looks back at it.
  • Fake Interactivity:
    • Subverted.
    Wendy: Will you help us find the golden map?
    Wendy: No? Oh, I planned this whole thing out where you can help us find things... it was part of our exec's audience participation program. Oh well.
    • Parodied in episode 5 with a Dora the Explorer-esque show that Bryan and Clark use to learn Spanish to impress Maria and her friends. The requests are far more demanding than an average toddler should be able to do.
      "Dora": Repeat after me: "Voy a la casa con mis primas hermanas."
      Bryan and Clark: [monotonously] Voy a la casa con mis primas hermanas.
  • False Camera Effects: Bryan's independent film includes Camera Abuse, Jitter Cam, and even the sound of wind blowing into the mic.
  • Fan Disservice:
    • Most of the Beach Episode. Includes the obese woman in a bikini sitting on Bryan.
    • Episode 26. Everyone is in their own world, naked, and losing to their own fears. For example, Bryan getting stabbed repeatedly.
    • Scenes that look like they're supposed to be titillating but instead apply extreme Off-Model to the characters so that the result looks more silly.
    • The Stripperiffic outfits of the Action Girls Club. They range from amusing to downright disturbing.
  • Faux Action Girl:
    • Wendy may be one, depending on interpretation. The Stylistic Suck format makes it that no battles are shown directly, all of them offscreen or shown in still frames. However, the battles are strongly implied to happen.
    • Parodied with the "Action Girls Club" from episode 1.
  • First Law of Gender Bending: Averted. Clark stays as a girl for two episodes only.
  • It Came from the Fridge: Episode 17 has a food monster created by Mr. Montgomery hoarding food and not throwing it out when it becomes expired.
  • It Was His Sled: In-Universe example where the characters reveal something of a popular movie that is obvious, preceded by a "Spoiler Alert".
  • Lightbulb Joke: Due to Metaphorgotten, the plot of episode 20 becomes finding out how many citizens of Millville can replace the lightbulb at Town Hall.
  • Limited Animation: Used deliberately for a Retraux effect.
  • Man, I Feel Like a Woman: Subverted with Clark in episode 23. He looks shocked, then touches his breasts, and looks down. He screams and panics.
  • Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy:
    • Mr. and Mrs. Mercier, at least in their interests. Mr. Mercier enjoys cooking and sewing while Mrs. Mercier builds things in the shed.
    • In episode 14, this trope becomes the norm.
  • Meaningful Name: Many of the monsters' names. Sunny is the one at the beach while Pinn is the one from the bowling alley.
  • Medium Awareness: Wendy knows that she's a cartoon character and often addresses the staff and audience.
  • Men Buy from Mars, Women Buy from Venus: Parodied/inverted. A company that makes dresses aired an advertisement that said that they aren't for men. Every man started wearing dresses in that episode.
  • Monster of the Week
  • Mood Dissonance: A main source of humor. The scenes all look like ones from serious dramas, but the dialogue is actually really comedic and random.
  • Mood Whiplash:
    • "Earl of Sandwich", one of the most lighthearted episodes, aired before "Feary Canal", one of the most disturbing.
    • Within "Feary Canal", we see Wendy's fear sequence, where she gets torn apart by dogs. Offscreen, but still. Then we see Bryan's fear sequence. He fails a vocabulary test in the most absurd way and the teacher punishes him with death with a Scary Flashlight Face. Bryan immediately makes a Big "NO!" Then we see Clark's fear sequence, which takes the slapstick that happens to him, turns it on its head, as if to ask the viewer what they were thinking when they laugh at what happens to him.
    • "Seeking a Franz for the End of the World" starts out to take the subject of Maria's disappearance and the end of the world seriously, then shows an extended sequence in which Wendy, Bryan, and Clark squick over finding Rule 34 of themselves. Then it goes back to them being worried about what happened to Maria because they couldn't find her in her home.
  • The Most Dangerous Video Game: Cheese-chan and Baby, the pirated version. Using it will suck the player and his female friends into the game.
  • The Mountains of Illinois: The cast visits Florida to climb mountains that wouldn't look out of place in Anhui, China.
  • Mundane Made Awesome:
    • The bumper cars scene in episode 3.
    • In the Cooking Duel episode, Slow-Motion Drop is used for breaking an egg. Repeat Cuts of Wendy and Casey mixing the batter while screaming were used.
    • Clark finally makes the ultimate sandwich in episode 29. Suddenly, dramatic orchestral music plays and crepuscular rays shine on the sandwich, as he lifts the sandwich on a high place with people below bowing in a "The Circle of Life"-esque way. Being Clark, he drops the sandwich... and it falls up. It turns out that aliens abducted it.
  • Never Say "Die": Parodied.
    Albert: Why can't you just say "die"?
    Wendy: [pauses, turns to the audience] Because the show's distributed by 4Childs Media, so even an aborted fetus can watch it alone!
  • No Communities Were Harmed: Millville is loosely based on Moscow, Idaho.
  • No Fourth Wall: Wendy often addresses the audience and predicts their reactions to events in the show.
  • No, Mr. Bond, I Expect You to Dine: Used to make Cromwell look more manipulative and James more of a pervert.
  • Noodle Implements:
    • Random objects are seen flying off from some of the offscreen fights between Wendy and the monsters. One fight involved a tricycle, a mailbox, and a copy of Eight Easy Ways To Get Men To Notice You.
    • Mrs. Mercier brings unusual objects to the shed in the backyard for her project.
  • Noodle Incident: In episode 2, Clark calls Wendy asking her how to give a squirrel a handjob. Why he would need to do so and the circumstances that led to the incident has never been questioned.
  • no punctuation is funnier: The captions have no punctuation. For example, "No animals were harmed in the making of this cartoon or humans or plants but we did step on a mushroom somewhere"
  • Opening Narration: Usually takes the form: "The town of Millville is in danger! Monsters and X are Y! I, Wendy Mercier, am here to stop them!" X is a group of people related to the plot, and Y is an action that X is doing. X is usually more favorable than the monsters.
  • Out-of-Clothes Experience: The fear sequences in episode 26.
  • Overly Long Gag:
    • Clark making sandwiches at varying speeds in episode 25.
    • Wendy staring at James's left cheek in episode 28.
  • Parental Neglect: Wendy's parents were not good at watching her when she was little and are mostly ignorant of what she is doing.
  • Parody Sue:
    • Wendy's only important trait is that she's an Action Girl. She also has little bad traits. Characters call attention to this heavily and this makes her more susceptible to slapstick.
    • Maria Susana is a subversion. Her name literally translates to "Mary Sue" in Spanish, and she is considered physically attractive, but her immaturity and Ax-Crazy tendencies make her unwanted.
  • Pastel-Chalked Freeze Frame: Many of the episode endings. This gets lampshaded by the captioner in episode 9.
  • Permanently Missable Content: The Male Transformation Gun falls out of Clark's hands, off the cliffs, and into uncharted gorges.
  • Realistic Diction Is Unrealistic: Averted for comic effect. Characters constantly talk over each other, stutter, or have random asides. Lampshaded when Hirsch makes a list of things with the list showing up in the side, messing up, the item in the written list being crossed out, and replaced as he corrects himself.
  • Repeat Cut: Parodied. Sometimes they zoom in a bit too much on the subject, sometimes it's used as an Overly Long Gag, and sometimes an unrelated clip (like a goat bleating) is put in the middle between the cuts.
  • Retraux: The animation in general is supposed to be evocative of Dark Age cartoons, involving large amounts of Stylistic Suck.
  • Viewers Are Goldfish: Defied.
    • When Stacy is introduced in episode 18, a caption showing her name appears every time she appears on the screen. Wendy tells whoever is in control of the captions that she's sure that the audience knows Stacy's name by now.
    • In the same episode, Willow recaps and flashback to events that happened five minutes ago. Everyone else tells her to get on with it already.
  • Viewers Are Morons: Wendy treats the audience this way.
  • Wacky Sound Effect
  • Weirdness Magnet: The statue in downtown Millville.
  • Where the Hell Is Millville?: It's never stated where Millville actually is. It's based on Moscow, Idaho, but it's clear that the show does not take place there.
  • Who Writes This Crap?!: Asking this is one of the captioner's most defining traits.
  • Why Don't You Marry It?
    • In episode 9, Bryan gets a paddleball for Christmas and he spends the rest of the year playing with it and bringing it everywhere. Wendy asks him this question.
    • And in episode 11, it's revealed that Bryan and his paddleball became legally married.
    • In episode 24, the paddleball is transformed into a woman. Bryan loses interest in her because she's not a paddleball anymore.
  • Word Salad Title: The eroge, Cheese-chan and Baby. Cheese is a "Blind Idiot" Translation of Chizu, and the plot involves finding a Doorstop Baby.
  • Wraparound Background: Parodied.
    Bryan: Didn't we already go through this neighborhood?
    Wendy: I don't know. I might as well be driving in circles.
    [Cut to Wendy driving in an area circled by the background]
  • Year X:
    • The work takes place in the year 20—.
    • In "Clark to the Future", Clark ends up on the years 30—, 10—, and 19—.

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