Dexters Laboratory / Tropes A to C

Dexter's Laboratory Trope Examples
Main series: A - C | D - F | G - L | M - R | S - Z
Spin-offs: Dial M for Monkey | Justice Friends

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A

• Abhorrent Admirer:
  • Mandark to Dee Dee.
  • The Creepy-Eyed Girl from "Aye Eye Eyes" to Dexter.
• Abusive Parents: Mandark's parents. While they're not the worst examples of the trope, they aren't very supportive of Mandark's love for science, and they gave him a name (Susan) that would subject him to a lot of ridicule from other kids.
• Accent Upon The Wrong Syllable
  • At least with respect to US pronunciation. "Dee Dee, get out of my laBORatory!" True to his crazy accent, however, that is how "laboratory" is pronounced in most places outside the US.
  • And then there's Mandark's laugh. 'HA ha ha! HA ha HA ha HA!
• Accidental Athlete: "Sports a Poppin" has Dexter's dad trying to teach Dexter to be more athletic. While Dexter fails at traditional sports he demonstrates great athleticism at the end of the episode when fighting a giant monster outside his Dad's field of view.
• Actor Allusion:
  • Kath Soucie voices another intelligent AI who assists the main character frequently.
  • "The Koos is Loose": Koosie making a pepé wrap is an allusion to Dom De Luise's second career as a cook.
  • Rasslor from the Dial M for Monkey episode of the same name was voiced by Randy Savage. His last line in the episode was, naturally, "OH YEAAAH!".
  • "Just an Old Fashioned Lab Song" is wall-to-wall references to guest star Paul Williams' music and personal life. ^note This includes: his height, his appearance, his songs ("We've Only Just Begun"), his album titles ("Here Comes Inspiration") his album covers (the title card is made to look like the cover of his album "Classics"), and even his car! Thankfully, they didn't include the substance abuse.
  • In the Justice Friends segment Things That Go Bonk in the Night, Major Glory and Puppet Pal Mitch, both voiced by Rob Paulsen, have puppets of each other, as do Valhallen and Puppet Pal Clem, both voiced by Tom Kenny.
• Adam Westing: Koosalagoopagoop, from "The Koos is Loose", is voiced by Dom De Luise and is a parody of the increasingly saccharine Don Bluth movies DeLuise had been in, like A Troll in Central Park.
• Affectionate Parody: A lot of episodes and characters are loving parodies of well-known works of fiction.
  • The Justice Friends parody DC and Marvel heroes in general.
  • Action Hank serves as an affectionate parody of G.I. Joe.
  • Dee Dee is a fan of a My Little Pony pastiche called Pony Puffs.
  • "Mock 5" parodies Speed Racer.
  • "Trapped With a Vengeance" parodies Die Hard.
  • "Photo Finish" parodies James Bond, particularly the early movies, including its Blofeld-esque villain and its Goldfinger-esque camera Death Ray.
  • "Dee Dee's Room" parodies ''Apocalypse Now.
    Dexter: The horror... the horror... the horror...
  • "Game Over" parodies TRON.
  • "The Golden Diskette" is a spoof of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
  • "G.I.R.L. Squad" parodies Charlie's Angels.
  • "Comic Relief" is mainly an affectionate send-up of The Marvel Super Heroes, complete with animation limited mainly to the characters' mouths moving when they speak.
• All Girls Like Ponies: Dee Dee (plus her racially diverse friends Mimi and Lee Lee). They provide the trope image.
• All Work vs. All Play:
  • Played with with Dexter and Dee Dee (respectively All Work and All Play), where there would be episodes where Dexter would be more relaxed than Dee Dee, or Dee Dee more work-minded than Dexter only to turn back at the end. Status Quo Is God or an Aesop of being yourself?
  • Sometimes averted in certain episodes, as Dexter frequently worries about normal things for a boy his age, such as his favorite television heroes, and being liked by the neighborhood kids.
• Almighty Janitor: "Yohnny the Yanitor" from the episode "Trapped with a Vengeance".
• Alternative Foreign Theme Song: The Italian version has a different opening theme.
• Always Someone Better: Mandark was this in his debut where he gained the praise of the faculty in the first day and was generally better at Dexter at everything.
• Ambiguous Gender Identity: In "Star Trek Unconventional", there is a character◊ who seems feminine-looking but has slight stubble and a male voice - it's not clear if they're AFAB with a chain-smokers voice or transgender; then in the episode "Chess Mom" a judge is shown, and has an androgynous look◊, although it's unclear as to whether it's a long-haired man with male breast growth, a trans woman or a Bearded Lady and this is not commented upon In-Universe, although this may have been for Rule of Funny, but more likely Rule of Creepy, or given that it's a chess game, Rule of Fun.
• Ambiguously Gay: The pixie prince from "D & DD", who is very effeminate and talks like a Valley Girl.
• Ambiguously Human: Santa Claus appears in Dexter vs Santa's Claws, but it's never clarified if he is human or not; his limited dialogue and ability to vanish/re-appear suggests he may not be human.
• And I Must Scream: Used in "Photo Finish" when the villain Red Eye attempts to use a machine to trap Dexter inside a photograph of himself. The fate ends up befalling Red Eye instead, and it isn't a pleasant experience judging by his reaction.
• Animation Bump: The What A Cartoon! Show shorts and the first six episodes of the series (animated by Fil-Cartoons) have instances of motions and lip movements are more fluid than the later, more Limited Animation episodes animated over at Rough Draft Studios.
• Animesque: The series' character designs are very much American, but the visual effects and editing style deliberately channel those commonly used in Japanese animation. Ian Jones-Quartey would later describe it as "Hanna Barbanime", a term Craig McCracken agreed as fitting.
• Annoyingly Repetitive Child: In "Jeepers Creepers, Where is Peepers?", Dee Dee (Dexter's Childish Older Sibling) asks Dexter to help her save Peepers. She tells him, "You gotta!" four times in a row.
• Annoying Younger Sibling: Inverted; Dee Dee is an annoying older sibling to Dexter.
• Arch-Enemy: Mandark is Dexter's most prominent and only recurring adversary.
• Art Evolution:
  • The art style changed a bit over the course of the first two seasons (early episodes and later episodes have slightly different model designs, for instance), but once Tartakovsky left his place as director afterwards, the series took a very dramatic stylistic change, with far cleaner lines and completely different background designs and color palettes, for starters (just compare this◊ to this◊). This was likely due to the conversion from hand-drawn to entirely digital animation (which was relatively new at the time) at that moment.
  • Dee Dee had thicker eyebrows and seemed to lack a chin in the first few episodes.
• The Artifact: The titular laboratory itself became one towards the end of Season 4 (making the show border on Artifact Title), partially due to the season's Genre Throwback emphasis on 1960s Hanna-Barbera-style episodes. When it did get used, it was as a backdrop, not for the story itself.
• Artistic License – Prison: "Dexter Detention" is full of this, although it's mostly Played for Laughs.
  • Overlapping with Artistic License – Education, the Detention Warden whom Dexter meets in detention class when put in detention for yelling, while based on the stereotypical Drill Sergeant Nasty towards students receiving Disproportionate Retribution, clearly goes beyond treating the students as typical criminals, using disciplines like solitary confinement and max-security prison arrangements for petty reasons, and even performing Misplaced Retribution when one of the students makes Dexter mess up with a written line.
  • When Dexter and the rest of the students in detention escape from the class via Fast Tunneling, they end up breaking into an actual prison and are forced to stay there as punishment. In such a rare occurrence in real life, a prison would most likely keep any child who breaks in at a visitor section and contact their parents or guardians.
• Art Shift: The animation for the outside sequences in "Snowdown" is an Homage to Calvin and Hobbes.
• Asshole Victim: The Ultrabot 2000 in the episode "Ultrajerk 2000." Doesn't help that his blind ambition to destroy Dexter ends up getting the better of him.
• Attack Pattern Alpha: In the episode "Last But Not Beast".
• Author Appeal: Tartakovsky seems to have a thing for classic Super Robot anime.
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: Dee Dee may be the bane of Dexter's existence in most episodes, but it's simply because she's always causing chaos and destruction to his lab directly. Outside of the lab, the two actually get along pretty well... as much as a brother and sister typically do, anyway. Neither will shy away from helping the other when they're in trouble, and they do have fun together. Dee Dee being in actual peril gives Dexter a good excuse to enthusiastically use his technology to save the day, and Dee Dee is always looking out for her baby brother anyway.

B

• The B Grade: Not a B, but an A minus in "Sister Mom". Dexter didn't want Mom to know so he used one of his inventions to turn Dee Dee into Mom for the conference. Dee Dee was furious when she found out and at Dexter and the teacher made a big deal out of this. She thought it was something more serious, like accidentally blowing up the school lab. Then Dexter tells her he wouldn't even have gotten that A minus if his "stupid sister" would stop bothering him all the time.
• Backing Away Slowly: At the end of "Dollhouse Drama", Dee Dee gets Mom to confront Dexter for accidentally breaking her Darbie doll. As they barge into his room, they see that Dexter (who had been having some major Sanity Slippage throughout the episode) has hooked Darbie to a medical device and he tells them to be quiet so she can "sleep", causing both to slowly walk out with disturbed expressions.
• Badass Adorable: Monkey, who is considered to be one of the Dexterverse top superheroes.
• Badass Family: Dexter may have a pretty screwed up family at times, but when they work together, they're the definition of badass. Case in point, the army and all the world's superheroes (including Monkey) were completely powerless against Badaxtra. Dexter's family united, got a Combining Mecha, flew to Japan, and managed to kill him. They've even got a theme song!.
  • "Go, Dexter Family! Go" dealt with the entire family being kidnapped by a massive alien who wanted to steal Dexter's scientific knowledge. The family ends up breaking out of imprisonment, take down the alien's minions and save Dexter.
• Bad Future: The main conflict in Ego Trip. Mandark takes over the world using one of Dexter's inventions and hoards all knowledge and science for himself, deliberately forcing the populace to live in indigent, primitive poverty and stupidity. Dexter and his various future selves put a stop to it, ultimately constructing a gloriously Zee Rust techno-paradise. At first, the various Dexters try to prevent it from ever happening, but they end up creating a Stable Time Loop ensuring that it's going to happen again and again.
  • Oh, and why did the Stable Time Loop happen? Because Dee Dee was actually the one to put a stop to it, and their egos just couldn't let that go.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Usually when an episode has Dexter and Dee Dee in direct conflict with each other or Dexter is just trying to stop Dee Dee from ruining something, Dexter will end up defeated by the end of the episode. There are only a small handful of episodes where Dexter ends up in a better position than Dee Dee by the ending.
• Bad Humor Truck: "Ice Cream Scream" had an ice cream man who actively tried to avoid Dexter all because the boy's insistence to purchase the most expensive ice cream available and pay in pennies inadvertently ruined the man's life.
• Baffled by Own Biology: In "Chicken Scratch", Dexter wakes up with chicken pox for the first time. Being an Innocent Prodigy, he wonders what these "strange protrusions" are until Dee Dee explains what chicken pox is (albeit in her own unique way).
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • In "Dexter's Lab: A Story", Dad comes into Dexter's room and sternly summons him up about a "lab" he saw; Dexter panics, thinking he saw his secret laboratory, but Dad was actually talking about the dog he found — a Labrador retriever — which he allows to keep, much to his relief.l
  • In the episode "Unfortunate Cookie", Dee Dee comes into Dexter's lab to tell him about a Chinese finger trap she found in her box of fortune cookies. Dexter responds by saying, "How can it be?" and begins a mathematical lecture about what we think is the possibility of that happening, but it turned out he was just complaining about how Dee Dee keeps coming into his lab.
  • In the episode "G.I.R.L. Squad", Dee Dee and her friends come into Dexter's lab to ask him what "Lick crime" means. Dexter gives the girls a tour of stuff they might need to help them with their mission, which eventually leads to a teleporter, which Dexter winds up using to teleport the girls out of his lab so they won't bother him.
  • In the episode, "Dexter is Dirty", Dexter starts yelling at Dee Dee after she fails to help him up while he's laminated. She starts to look sad and imagine herself out in the snow, but it turns out she's picturing herself sledding down a mountain, and this gives her the idea to use Dexter as a sled.
    • Subverted: What Dee Dee ends up doing causes Dexter to destroy the living room in the house. Mom comes in and angrily yells, "Dexter!" She walks up to Dexter, and then suddenly changes to a happy mood and says, "Just look how clean you are!"
• Beat the Curse Out of Him: Dexter's family is possessed by parasitic aliens in one episode, and he has to pummel his family members until the parasites release their control.
• Berserk Button: For Dexter's first future self in Ego Trip, the scrawny, weak and cowardly Number 12. You can beat and push him around, insult him and break his spirit... But whatever you do, do not break his glasses.
• Be the Ball: Happens a few times:
  • In "Dexter Dodgeball" Dexter exacts his revenge on one of the three dodgeball bullies by crushing him into a ball and dunking him into a hoop. Ouch.
  • In "Now That's a Stretch!" Dexter becomes a Rubber Man after merging with some bubblegum borrowed from Dee-Dee. Shortly thereafter, Dee-Dee (who has gotten a bubblegum craving) finds Dexter and realises where the bubblegum has gone missing. After giving Dexter a good chew and balloon blow, she molds him into a ball shape, then proceeds to dribble him and eventually dunks him into a hoop.
• Beware the Nice Ones:
  • You do not want to see Dexter's father angry. Same with his mother.
    Did you say... snowballs?
  • And God help you if you make Dee Dee seriously angry.
• Big Ball of Violence: Used on occasion, such as when Dexter escaped the school janitor's traps for him and the two came to blows.
• Bigger on the Inside: Dexter has a humongous lab so big that there are some parts of it Dexter has forgotten about, yet it is somehow able to fit in the closed-off space of his relatively small house. Sometimes this is Hand Waved as the lab being underground, but this doesn't make a whole lot of sense either, since Dexter often walks directly into it from his second-floor bedroom.
  • The Musical Episode "Lab-Ret-O" implies that Dexter's lab may be located in some sort of pocket dimension located behind a certain wall of the house.
  • Parodied in an episode where Dexter shrinks the house to observe it inside his lab, leaving Dexter's lab of normal size on the inside, but a disembodied door on the outside.
  • Also parodied in an episode where Dexter draws a map of the house. Guess which is the smallest room.
• Big "NO!": Dexter, numerous times. Including the scene where he's surrounded by cooties.
  • In "Jeepers Creepers, Where is Peepers," the transforming Peepers yells this when he sees Dexter and Koosalagoopagoop being attacked by Hokochu (or rather Hookocho) before breaking out of his container.
  • The Ice Cream Man, after Dexter asks if he's got change for a hundred. This is after the Ice Cream Man explains that he hates Dexter for paying in pennies.
• Big Red Button: "Ooooooh! What does THIS button dooooo?"
• Big Sister Bully: Dee Dee has been like this ever since Dexter was born, constantly making him cry and smashing all of his experiments and making a hobby of destroying Dexter's lab, for fun, despite her assertions that she loves Dexter very much. Of course, at the same time, there's at least one episode that essentially states it's a working relationship that Dexter needs in order to be able to properly focus.
• Big, Stupid Doodoo-Head:
  • Dee Dee greats Dexter with "Morning, poophead" in "The Big Cheese".
  • When the alien leader reads Dexter's thoughts in "Go, Dexter Family! Go!", he is angered at how what are supposed to be thoughts from a boy genius aren't helpful toward his agenda at all. The thought that infuriates the alien leader the most is "My sister Dee Dee is a certified stupidhead".
• Boredom Montage: In "Space Case", after the aliens kidnap Dee Dee, Dexter has one of these in his lab. He has another in "Dee Dee and the Man" after he "fires" Dee Dee and realizes it's not the same without her bothering him.
• Breakfast in Bed: In one episode, Dexter, Dee-Dee, and Dad give Mom breakfast in bed on Mother's Day. However, Mom was anything but thrilled after losing her signature gloves.
• Brought Home the Wrong Kid: Dexter invokes this when he find an Identical Stranger with parents who are science geniuses like him. They swap temporarily and the parents never know the difference (despite the kids looking quite distinct from each other).
• Broken Aesop: In "Star Spangled Sidekicks" Dee Dee is chosen over Dexter to be Major Glory's sidekick despite the latter having better combat skills and weaponry. The lesson is supposed to be that it takes more than skills to be a superhero;it also takes heart. However when Major Glory's actual arch nemesis show up for a fight, it is only thanks to Dexter looking out for his sister that they were able to win, otherwise she would have easily been destroyed. And Dee Dee ends up taking all the credit anyway.
  • Though in a Karmic twist Dexter's selfless actions indirectly make Dee Dee pass up the position which ends up being given to the Heroic Wannabe "Fat Boy" who perhaps showed heart as well.
• Bumbling Dad: Dexter's dad is often quite oblivious and dim, and there's very few occasions he does show common sense.
• Bumbling Sidekick: Gets reconstructed in "Dyno-Might". Dexter is called on to repair Dynomutt after he has been damaged in a fight but decides that the goofy canine couldn't possibly be any help to Blue Falcon and decides to create an improved model for the hero. After said improved model goes on a Knight Templar rampage over minor crimes and Dynomutt saves the day, it becomes clear why this trope can be a good thing:
  • The hero genuinely likes their sidekick and the goofy behavior can keep the hero from taking things too seriously.
  • The sidekick is in the business of crimefighting so bumbling or not they have to be capable of handling themselves.
  • The sidekick can offer viewpoints and tactics that the hero may not think of, as seen when Dynomutt defeats the rogue robot with unorthodox strategy where Blue Falcon and Dexter's conventional assault failed.
• Butt-Monkey:
  • Dexter, big time. Nearly every episode has Dee Dee destroy his lab.
  • His backbone-lacking young adult self from Ego Trip, Number 12, had it even worse. He worked for Mandark designing cubicles in a small room where he fell subject to psychological torture.
  • In most cases, Mandark himself is this in his starring roles.

C

• Cain and Abel: Parodied in "Dollhouse Drama", where a shrunken and delusional Dexter is played with by Dee Dee and he sees his toy robot with his name on it as his evil twin brother.
• Call-Back:
  • Like the name implies, "Dee Dee's Rival" at least starts out as a scene-for-scene remake of "Dexter's Rival," appropriate considering the latter introduced the show's default Big Bad Mandark and the former introduces his sister.
  • In addition to his Giant Robot, the Giant Dexo-Robo, showing up prominently in several eps, his power frame (first called the "Dextransformer" then later the "Exerjock 4000") from the early first season dodgeball episode reappears in three late season 2 eps, the first one ("Gooey Aliens That Control Your Mind") specifically mentioning the "dodgeball incident" (and including a sweep pan over a room of previous episodes' inventions).
  • Dexter brings back his "Dex-Star" identity from "Sidekicks Assemble" to fight alongside Blue Falcon and Dynomutt.
  • The monster Dexter fights off at the end of "Sports a Poppin" is the exact same monster he incidentally unleashes at the beginning of "Dee-Dimensional".
  • A meta-example in that the second act of "Last But Not Beast" features Monkey and the Justice Friends fighting the kaiju, just as they were the second cartoon short in the first season.
• Calling Your Attacks: When Dee Dee and Dexter get turned into monsters in "Monstory", they both call their attacks when fighting each other.
  Dee Dee: Nitrooo PUNCH!
  Dexter: Buzzsaw!
  Dexter: Tail Whip!
  Dee Dee: Squid Attack!
  Dexter: Monkey Mouth!
  Dee Dee: Octo-Bash!
• The Cameo: Fred Flintstone and George Jetson make a brief appearance in "Beard to be Feared". There are also the scenes in "Dad is Disturbed" which feature Betty and Barney Rubble, who are apparently friends of Mom and Dad.
• Canon Discontinuity: The PSA "Safety Clicks!" and the mini-segments that aired in Season 1 and 2 are not part of the series canon, they're just there for humor purposes and should not be considered canonical, even with Negative Continuity.
• Card-Carrying Villain: Mandark, after going through a combination of Diminishing Villain Threat and Flanderization.
• The Cat Came Back: The main premise of "The Continuum of Cartoon Fools" is Dee Dee continuously returning to Dexter's lab no matter what lengths he goes to prevent her from getting back in.
• Caught Up in a Robbery: In "Super Mom", Dexter's mom is waiting in line at the bank when a large robber bursts in to rob the place. Thanks to Dexter's latest invention accidently zapping his mom, she has super powers so she casually tosses him aside so she can continue waiting in line, then eventually flings him at the wall by his ear and knocks him out when he gets mad.
• Character Catchphrase:
  • Dee Dee's "Ooooh, what does THIS button do?"
  • "DEE DEE! GET OUT OF MY LABORATORY!"
  • "AT LAST! MY GREATEST CREATION IS COMPLETED!"
• Charlie and the Chocolate Parody: A machine factory, complete with Golden Diskettes in order to enter and singing, and owned by a guy who is most certainly not Stephen Hawking in the episode "Golden Diskette" (Parody of the "Golden Ticket" in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory).
• The Chew Toy:
  • Dexter, sometimes, though he has nothing on the Ice Cream Man from "Ice Cream Scream". Turns out ever since Dexter bought ice cream from him, and paid him in pennies, a series of unfortunate events had happened to him since, including chipping his tooth while trying to put them in the safe due to tripping on his laces after counting them, dumped by his girlfriend, having his car towed away, getting kicked out of his apartment and being forced to live under a highway because of this one act. And to add insult to injury, once the Ice Cream Man forgives Dexter and allows him to purchase ice cream, Dexter pays the Ice Cream Man with a 100-dollar bill.
  • A literal example in "Now That's a Stretch!": Dexter replaces Dee-Dee's lost bubblegum and is, accordingly, being chewed, popped, turned into a basketball, chewed some more... Naturally, Dexter quickly gets sick of it and eventually decides to find a way to get away from Dee-Dee and undo the Rubber Man transformation just to give Dee-Dee her bubblegum back.
• Chickenpox Episode: "Chicken Scratch" is about Dexter getting chickenpox, which Dee Dee claims is caused by contaminated chickens breaking into houses and pecking itchy spots on people's bodies. She also claims that scratching the spots will turn you into a chicken. Dexter tries to cure his illness without scratching himself, but he ultimately can't resist and scratches himself silly. The episode ends with Dexter turning into a chicken.
• Childish Older Sibling: Despite being Dexter's older sister, Dee Dee acts very childish, and is usually seen destroying or ruining the show's titular location (usually by accident), no matter how many times Dexter tells her to stay away from it. Dexter is endlessly annoyed by Dee Dee and sees her as a nuisance.
• Child Prodigy: Dexter and Mandark. Dexter could even be called a baby prodigy; he was making scientific-sounding observations about his family and his house when they got back from the hospital the night he was born. And DeeDee, for all her kookiness, is a really good dancer. She can dodge lasers while doing ballet!
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome:
  • Mandark's sister Lalavava appears in "Dee Dee's Rival" as a rival to Dee Dee and is never seen again.
  • Dee Dee's friends Mee Mee and Lee Lee are nowhere to be seen in Seasons 3 and 4.
• Cloud Cuckoo Lander: Dee Dee is often quite eccentric and has an extremely odd perception of how the world works.
• Clown Car: One episode shows a single, comically tall clown coming out of a comically undersized clown car, eventually biting Dexter.
• Clownification: Dexter becomes a "were-clown" after being bitten by a party clown, forcing Dee Dee to save him by turning into a mime.
• Cluster F-Bomb: Happens constantly in "Rude Removal", which was made as a joke by the staff and not seen outside of event panels until Adult Swim briefly put the episode on its YouTube channel and website. The episode involves Dee Dee and Dexter creating evil clones of themselves when Dexter uses a "Rude Removal" device. The clones curse a lot throughout the episode.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: While Mee Mee and Lee Lee and wore identical outfits to Dee Dee in their first appearances, they wear green and purple versions of Dee Dee's outfit in later episodes.
• Combining Mecha: Dexter builds one in "Last But Not Beast" to battle Bedaxtra, which requires the help of his family to use.
  • Cue theme song.
• Comic-Book Adaptation: DC Comics put out 34 issues from 1999 to 2003. There were also Dexter's Laboratory stories featured in Cartoon Cartoons, Cartoon Network Presents, and Cartoon Network Block Party, which were also from DC. IDW Publishing launched a new series in 2014.
• Comic-Book Time: Ignoring episodes where Dexter had an Overnight Age-Up or he imagined himself and Dee-Dee to be elderly in the future, or a Baby Morph Episode involving Dexter's parents, none of the characters aged one bit during the entire series' run.
• Company Cross References: In "Tele-Trauma", Dexter, who is beaming TV shows straight to his brain, is constantly reciting TV quotes, including "Townsville's in trouble!".
• Conspicuous Gloves: Dexter's mom always wears gloves due to being a germaphobe. This was explained in one episode.
• Cool and Unusual Punishment: This happened to Dexter in the episode "The Old Switcharooms", where he and Dee Dee are sent to each other's rooms as punishment for destroying Dad's bowling trophy. Dexter, paranoid that Dee Dee will take advantage of the punishment and wreck his lab, eventually loses it and smashes up Dee Dee's room to construct a disguise and sneak his way out of Dee Dee's room —only to discover she never even opened his lab. When they later return to her destroyed room, Dee Dee points at Dexter, destroying the trophy again. Dexter calls Dee Dee a "clumsy fool", but Dad remains angry at him for destroying his sister's things. The cartoon ends with the boy genius literally in the doghouse.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive:
  • In "Chubby Cheese", the head of the titular restaurant chain is actually using Chubby Cheese's as a front for fleecing people out of money and plotting world domination.
  • Ego Trip shows Mandark becoming this in the future, when he takes over the company he and Dexter work for and uses its resources to take over the world.
• Cow Tools: Sometimes Dexter can be seen tightening a bolt on some sort of metal box with no obvious function.
• Crapsack World: The (third) future in "Ego Trip" has everyone too stupid to do anything right and living in extremely poor conditions.
• Creepy Child: One falls in love with Dexter in "Aye, Aye, Eye", only to meet an equally creepy boy and dump him.
• Crisis Crossover: Last But Not Beast had the Dexter, Monkey and Justice Friends segments connected via the giant monster destroying Japan. The Monkey segment even skips its usual opening credits to continue the story.
• Crossover:
  • Dexter, the Justice Friends and Monkey would sometimes cross over with each other, although the Justice Friends' cameos were limited to being in posters, comic-books or Major Glory in-person, while Monkey's appearances were, well, as Monkey.
  • The episode "Dyno-Might" was a crossover with Dynomutt, Dog Wonder where the Blue Falcon asked Dexter to repair Dynomutt and Dexter instead made a new Dynomutt who was more competent than the original, but had the side effect of being more hostile and dangerous toward civilians.
  • One of the variants of the first issue of the IDW comic book features the Powerpuff Girls. The Justice Friends and the Puppet Pals did appear in the 1998 PPG series.
  • Dexter makes a cameo in Time Squad.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Dexter's dad is revealed to be a stunt biker in one episode, where in other episodes he's often portrayed as somewhat ditzy.
• Cruel Twist Ending: There is three such instances in this show:
  • In "Way of the Dee Dee", instead of being influenced by Dee Dee to spend more time outside of his laboratory, Dexter is driven insane and destroys his entire lab. Dee Dee realizes the big mistake she made and runs off crying. The episode ends on a somber note with Dexter once again bottled up inside his lab.
  • In "Germ Warfare", everybody but Dexter is sick during the flu season and Dexter must protect himself not to get sick. This backfires when Dee Dee breaks into his lab yet again to search for her hankey which she claims to have lost in Dexter's lab. The episode ends with Dexter having caught the flu from Dee Dee.
  • Perhaps the most prominent example is "Dexter Detention", where Dexter is sent to detention for shouting out loud in class after being annoyed by a student who kept asking him for answers on their test. At the end of the episode, Dexter and the other students in detention dig a hole in the floor to escape, but find out that they've accidentally broke into a prison. The episode ends with Dexter in prison breaking rocks at gunpoint (despite being a young child).
• Cymbal-Banging Monkey: In "Dexter's Assistant", Dexter makes Dee Dee smart enough to become the titular assistant for a Science Fair project. She eventually considers herself too good to be the assistant of someone who can't stand having their calculations questioned and gives him one of those toy monkeys to be his new assistant. In the end, Dee Dee wins the fair and Dexter blames the monkey for losing. While doing so, Dexter unwittingly places his nose in a position to be hit by the cymbals.

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