Dexters Laboratory / Tropes G to L

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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G

• Gag Haircut: In "Folly Calls", when Dee Dee attempts to cut a stray strand of hair, she accidentally chops off one of her pigtails. Dexter gives her a serum to grow the hair back, but she uses too much and her hair ends up taking over the house.
• Gainax Ending: Some of the cartoons just stop as soon as the writers ran out of jokes... leaving the characters stuck in some terrible predicament when 'The End' appears on the screen. Luckily, Status Quo Is God.
  • The ending of the (already strange) episode "Dexter and Computress Get Mandark" (aka. the episode written by a six-and-a-half year old boy) warrants a specific mention however. The episode ends with Mandark's re-sized head suddenly exploding, resulting in the planet being showered in millions of disembodied Mandark heads as Dexter chews out Computress.
• Gassy Gastronomy: In "Critical Gas", Dexter eats a large bean burrito and gets intestinal distress, which he thinks means he's going to die. As he makes arrangements for his imminent demise, the last task is to finally tell his parents about his secret laboratory. As he stands in front of the television set and starts to speak, his father tells him to go ahead and "let 'er rip." At this point, Dexter can't hold it any longer and lets out a massive fart, so powerful it smashes the TV into the wall behind him.
• Gender-Blender Name: Mandark's hippie parents named him Susan. This drove him to villainy in the later episodes in his retconned backstory.
• Generation Xerox:
  • Just... look at the first scene between Mom and Dad in "The Muffin King".
  • For that matter, Dexter's grandpa and old Dexter himself from the movie (and one of the What A Cartoon! Show pilots) look nearly identical.
• Genius Ditz: Dee Dee, for all of her goofiness, can break through any security measure Dexter comes up with. Also, when she's not wrecking them, can use Dexter's inventions with instant mastery, like a hovercraft Dexter himself crashed or an incredibly complicated giant mech.
• Genki Girl: Dee Dee.
• Ghostly Animals: The episode "Filet of Soul" is about Dexter and Dee Dee being haunted by the ghost of their dead pet goldfish. Later, the other animal spirits hold Dee Dee hostage until the fish (and its soul) is properly flushed.
• Girls Have Cooties: The so-called cooties Dexter encounters are in the form of butterflies which inhabit Dee Dee's bedroom.
• Glasses Curiosity: In "Framed," Dee Dee steals Dexter's glasses and mocks him with them while the two kids are on the bus to school. Later on, after he retrieves his broken specs from the floor of the bus, he lets another girl try them on when she compliments him on them.
• Gone Horribly Right:
  • In "Dexter's Assistant," Dexter needed an assistant to help him in his newest invention for a science fair. So he took Dee Dee and replaced her brain (which was the size of chewing gum) and replaced it with a new one that made her smarter. Now Dee Dee is much smarter than Dexter was, and knew more about his invention than he did, later when she left Dexter, she won the science fair with her own invention.
  • In "The Way of the Dee Dee," Dee Dee spends the entire episode teaching Dexter to loosen up and have fun, which ends with him going on a destructive rampage in his own lab with psychotic glee. She runs out of the lab crying after apologizing to Dexter.
  • In the Dynomutt, Dog Wonder crossover "Dyno-Might", Dexter becomes convinced that Dynomutt is too much of a goofy idiot sidekick to be any help to Blue Falcon, so he decides to design a new "Dynomutt X-90" to replace him. Unfortunately, Dynomutt X-90 believes that All Crimes Are Equal and uses lethal force to deal with even minor crimes such as littering and jaywalking, forcing Dexter to team up with Blue Falcon and the real Dynomutt to take him down.
• Good Angel, Bad Angel: In "Dexter's Rival," when Mandark — who has just forced Dexter to turn off his beloved Computer — asks for an introduction to Dee Dee, his angels agree that he should refuse... until they both realize that turning Dee Dee loose in Mandark's lab would be the perfect ironic revenge.
• Gosh Dang It to Heck!: In "Book ′Em," Dexter has a nightmare where he's being judged by the Devil for not returning his library book on time:
  • "Welcome... to library... HECK!"
• Grand Finale / Series Fauxnale: Two, actually; "Last But Not Beast" is the final episode of the series (or was intended to be) and wraps up the running plot about Dexter trying to hide his lab. "Ego Trip," meanwhile, is a film and definitively wraps up the Dexter/Mandark rivalry (one of the few things "Last But Not Beast" left hanging).
• Granola Girl: Mandark's Mom, Oceanbird.
• Gratuitous French: "The Big Cheese" has Dexter say "Omelette du fromage! Omelette du fromage!" Although it's a subversion because that's all he can say, and that's not even correct French. It's supposed to mean "cheese omelette" but literally means "omelette which belongs to cheese" (the correct form would be "omelette au fromage").
• Gratuitous Laboratory Flasks: Seen several times in the titular laboratory.
• Gravity Is a Harsh Mistress: Both Dexter and Koosie get this in spades during the battle with Hookocho in "The Koos is Loose".
• Greasy Spoon: The family dine at one while getting their car fixed in "Hamhocks and Armlocks".
• Greens Precede Sweets: In the episode "Hunger Strikes", Dexter refuses to eat his peas and so is refused upside-down pineapple cake as while Dee-Dee and Dad are allowed to have the ridiculously unhealthy and large-portioned desserts that dwarves the size of the small peas they ate (defeating the purpose of eating those peas). And so Dexter uses his scientific equipment to adjust his taste preferences, but as a consequence, he only wants to eat plants (especially in enormous quantity) and nothing else!
• Groin Attack: Dexter gets hit in the groin with a dodgeball at one point in "Dexter Dodgeball".
• Grossout Show: At times, particularly when people/animals get diseases. This was more frequent in the first two seasons.
• Gross-Up Close-Up: The inside of Dee Dee's nostrils and the giant germ.

H

• Halfway Plot Switch: "Road Rash" starts out with Mom and Dad getting Dexter a bicycle that he tries learning to ride. But as soon as Dee-Dee on her rollerblades starts tormenting Dexter, it changes into a full Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner Shout-Out, with Dexter constantly trying to catch the Road Runner-esque Dee-Dee with his frequent bicycle modifications.
• Hartman Hips: Due to the art style, lots of women in the series have Hartman Hips, such as Dexter's mom, the Touchy-Feely Neighbor Lady, Agent Honeydew from the Monkey cartoons, and the salesgirl from "Road Rash". But it's not surprising, since Hartman actually worked on the show.
• Hates Rich People: In "Accent You Hate", we see a trio of bullies wearing t-shirts stating what they hate. The first one sees a kid in fancy clothes walk by counting bills in his hand. He says "I hate rich kids." before going to beat him up.
• Helpless with Laughter: In "The Laughing", Dexter's transformation into a were-clown is preceded by him breaking into a fit of uncontrollable laughter.
• Heroic BSoD: Dee Dee falls into this when her teddy bear, Mr. Fuzzums, is taken away by the garbage truck in "Down in the Dumps".
• Heroic Mime: In "The Laughing", Dexter gets bitten by a clown and becomes a were-clown. To rescue him, his sister Dee Dee becomes a mime.
• Hollywood Board Games: Dexter's parents are playing Scrabble when they start to argue because Dexter's dad is apparently cheating. He rebukes it by reminding his wife that she cheated when they were playing cards. This shows that Child Prodigy Dexter gets his intelligence from his maternal side (his mom is quite skilled at handling advanced technology and his maternal grandpa is a scientist too) — Dexter's mom cheating while dealing the cards is left ambiguous but, if true, is another sign of her craftiness. Meanwhile, the fact that her husband has to resort to Scrabble Babble shows that he's not someone you'd call clever.
• Hollywood Law: This is most relevant in the end of Season 2, Episode 32, Part 3: "Dexter Detention".
• Hollywood Science: But what do you expect? It's a funny cartoon.
• Hurricane of Puns: This match at Flushing Meadows is just whizzing by! But you're in luck, there will be no commercial breaks. The tension is swelling, no relief in sight. He's in the lead now, but will. He. Hold. It?
• Hypocrite:
  • Dee Dee once gets on Dexter's case for experimenting on one of her dolls. Ignoring her own frequent(ly destructive) visits to his lab.
  • Pretty much anytime Dee Dee meets someone of her own clingy and destructive level she finds them intolerable and inconsiderate. Ironically subverted one time Dexter loses it and completely destroys her room and all her personal belongings. Her response?
  Dee Dee: Dexter! You're naked!!!
  • Dexter himself occasionally shows No Sense of Personal Space and can be equally intrusive and annoying. His father has to trick him into leaving when his badgering interrupts a golf game for example.

I

• Idiot Hero: Dexter can time travel and build a miles-long, underground lab, but he will go through hell and back to buy ice cream that he could easily make at home, as seen in "Ice Cream Scream".
• I'll Pretend I Didn't Hear That: A variation occurs in "The Old Switcharooms": Dexter tries to sneak into his lab from Dee Dee's room to ensure that she isn't trashing it. Dexter's dad, who is somehow aware that Dexter is doing this even without looking at him, casually whips out (in a very stern tone) this:
  "No son of mine had better try to escape his punishment...or else that certain son will find himself in an even worse punishment."
• Intoxication Ensues: In Topped Off, Dexter and Dee Dee drink some coffee there parents drank to see what the stuff was with the transformation every drink. They then begin feeling energized just when they were about to sleep.
  "Dexter: Do you feel anything yet?" "Dee Dee: No, now what genius?"
• Inconvenient Itch: Dexter at one point gets the chicken pox and is told not to scratch the pox, or he'll turn into a chicken. He tries ways of keeping from scratching, even restraining himself completely, but nothing works and he eventually goes on a scratching spree... after which he indeed turns into a chicken.
• Involuntary Smile of Incapacitation: In the episode "Momdark", Dexter's mom ends up with a blissful smile on her face when she is placed in a People Jar after she is kidnapped by Big Bad Mandark.
• Incredibly Lame Fun: At an Amish community, when Dexter tries to explain "fun," the closest thing they can think of is churning butter.
• Innocently Insensitive: Dee Dee is usually just a playful Genki Girl who wants to play with her little brother. However her notions of fun include playing around with his pretty looking (and somewhat delicate) toys, and no amount of ranting at her to leave him alone ever seems to faze her.
• Instant Awesome: Just Add Mecha!: Dexter's default response to almost any physical threat is to build a mech and go shoot the danger to bits. Eventually he ends up with a hangar full of mecha, which he walks through, pondering which one to use for playing dodgeball.
• In the Future, We Still Have Roombas: Dozens of helper robots working for Dexter. Two of them even get A Day in the Spotlight.
  • And four become the villains in "Lab of the Lost".
• Irony: Dexter's secret Laboratory is supposed to be a secret yet for some reason Dee Dee, her friends, and Mandark know about it, defeating the purpose that it's supposed to be a secret. Although Dexter seems a lot more concerned with his parents finding out about the lab, presumably because he figures they'll either be unable to handle it (as "Last But Not Beast" proves—upon seeing the laboratory, they fall into Stunned Silence) or force him to stop using it.
• It Runs in the Family: Dexter believes that his grandfather's dinky lab is just child's play, but Dexter doesn't see his grandfather create free energy with it - the one thing Dexter himself couldn't achieve.
  • Scenes of Dexter's mother cooking show her using the same scientific precision and unbridled glee as Dexter in the throes of creation.
  • Likewise, his father acts much the same as Dee Dee does when disturbing Mom in the kitchen. She even ends up shouting at him in much the same way.
• It's Personal: After Dexter had Dee Dee destroy Mandark's lab, only then did Mandark swear revenge on Dexter, and they have been rivals ever since.

J

• Jedi Mind Trick: In "The Muffin King", Dad uses one on Dexter in an attempt to sneak some muffins over to him. Dee Dee sees through the trick and slaps Dexter, snapping him out of it.
• Jerkass:
  • "The Koos is Loose": The Trollbetoots. Everyone else in the Land of Koos was right to be offended by Koosy when he punched their king and kissed the queen (even if it was Dee Dee's doing, Koosy tried to stop her, and the people forgave him), but the Trollbetoots had absolutely no justifiable reason to pick on Koosy.
  • In "Old Man Dexter," the family is unsympathetic to Dexter who, because of his age, isn't allowed to participate in the family movie night. While Dexter handles it badly (he could have easily invented a hypno-ray), it still sucks when the whole family actively participates in something they have forbidden him from joining. Harsh.

K

• Kaiju: Several. More memorable ones involve an extra-dimensional horror with many eyes and tentacles (that's start of a stable time loop) and iconic Dexter "oops". Another episode involved Dexter and Dee Dee becoming giant monsters by drinking a mutation-causing formula and having an all out battle (complete with Calling Your Attacks). Finally, there's Badaxtra, the monster of the original Finale who nearly destroyed the world.
• Karma Houdini: Dee Dee never seems to get any comeuppance for some of her more intentional destruction of Dexter's work. She has repeatedly shown complete disregard for Dexter's safety during these instances, with cartoon physics being the only thing that saved him.
  • There's also Dee Dee's Moral Myopia of going ballistic anytime Dexter destroys something of hers. She is perhaps at her worst in "Trick or Treehouse".
  • Subverted in "Sdrawkcab", where she did end up with a deserving comeuppance.
  • She has had many other instances that do not involve Dexter's lab, such as "Star-Spangled Sidekick" and "Golden Diskette", where Dee Dee ends up winning something Dexter sought. Golden Diskette was even more jarring because Dee Dee only won due to her stealing Dexter's money to buy the ticket.
  • As "Book 'Em" shows, Dexter can't even go to the library without Dee Dee destroying the experience.
• Kiddie Kid: Dee Dee. She tends to act younger to her little brother, always invading and wrecking his lab, and is shown to love ballet, ponies, the color pink, and stuffed animals. Despite her childish demeanor, she's stated to be in sixth grade in one episode, making her eleven or twelve years old.
• Kids Hate Vegetables: In the episode "Hunger Strikes", Dexter is shown unable to stand eating broccoli, which his family demands that he eats or else he can't have dessert afterwards. In order to avoid future denial of desserts, Dexter invents a machine that will genetically alter his taste buds that will make eating vegetables more palatable. Only problem is that this machine not only makes veggies suddenly delicious, he also happens to turn into a Incredible Hulk-like monster that destroys everything in his path in search of the vegetables he craves.
• Killer Game Master: Dexter is one, which is why his friends readily insist that Dee Dee be given a chance to run the game in "D & DD".
• Killer Rabbit: The cute little Pony Puffs try to kill Dee Dee when they think she's an Action Hank fan in "Decode of Honor".

L

• Labcoat of Science and Medicine: Dexter wears a white coat.
• Lampshade Hanging: Well, literally in Dim (although the streetlight is an Expy of a Philips one!)
• Language Barrier: "Misplaced in Space" has Dexter trapped in an alien prison where nobody speaks his language and he has no idea how to get home.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: How Dexter solves the personal dilemma of revealing his secret lab to his parents in "Last But Not Beast". Dee Dee implies it's not the first time he's done so in "Parrot Trap".
• Laser-Guided Karma: After hurting and humiliating Dexter, and presumably everyone else, playing dodgeball for a week straight, Dexter gets revenge on three bullies using one of his inventions to beat them up with dodgeball just like they did to him in "Dexter Dodgeball".
• Last Day to Live: "Critical Gas" has Dexter think he's dying when he really just has gas and ends up going through a list of things to do before he dies.
• Later-Installment Weirdness:
  • The show had ended its initial run while it was still very popular, and since such popularity was evident, Cartoon Network decided to revive it a few years later. Genndy Tartakovsky was busy with Samurai Jack and Star Wars: Clone Wars, so production was turned over to Chris Savino; not only did all of the characters look significantly different (due to redesigning the show's visual look to resemble an older Hanna-Barbera cartoon), but the series also went through a lot of Retconning, contradicting the series' previous incarnation.
  • Mandark's lab was completely redesigned post-Ego Trip to better resemble Overlord Mandark's lab in the film, with an extremely bizarre and organic-looking exterior and interiors lit with harsh reddish light. In the pre-Ego Trip seasons, the exterior of Mandark's lab looked more like a nuclear power plant, and its interior◊ was quite brightly lit compared to Dexter's.
• Latex Perfection: Parodied in "G.I.R.L. Squad" when spoofing Charlie's Angels. When Dee-Dee calls for her friends, a random cat unmasks to reveal Mee-Mee, who then removes her latex mask to reveal Lee-Lee underneath!
  • Dee-Dee, of all characters, employs this in "Trick or Treehouse" to fool Dexter when poking her head out of the tree, disguised as a beautiful young woman that just happens to have a voice similar to Dee-Dee's.
• Leaning Tower of Mooks: In "Gooey Aliens That Control Your Mind", Dexter's family (under the control of Puppeteer Parasites) perch on top of each others' shoulders to counter the Dex-Transformer suit.
• Lens Flare: Mostly when Dexter uses his Mecha.
• Limited Wardrobe: Dexter is shown at one point to have his closet filled with nothing but the same labcoats and boots he always wears.
  • Be fair, he did also have a suit to wear for the first day of school. Now Dee Dee, she has a limited wardrobe.
• Linked List Clue Methodology: In "Nuclear Confusion," Dee Dee steals a nuclear reactor core from the lab, hides it, and challenges Dexter to find it by solving a series of clues she's left for him. Unfortunately, said core will go critical and destroy the entire planet if it's not back in its reactor within an hour. Dexter just manages to prevent the meltdown—only to discover that Dee Dee has taken a book he planned to read and left more clues to follow.
• Literal Genie: One episode ended with Dexter telling Computer to make him a sandwich. And she did.
• Literal Metaphor: In "Dexter's Debt", Dexter held a garage sale. Two aliens showed up saying "[they] will take his light converters." Once he said how much he was charging for each pair, they repeated that they will TAKE the light converters and he understood.
• Literal Split Personality: "Rude Removal" deals with Dexter making a machine that can split the user from their bad selves. They become good with a polite British accent, while the bad counterparts retain their regular voices, but they look rough and speak in a vulgar language. Dexter and Dee Dee in the short try to keep their rude clones away from being out causing trouble.
• Literal Surveillance Bug: In the episode "Repairanoid", Dexter sends out a fly bot to find out why his lights are flickering. The electrician ,sent by Dexter's Mom, sees the fly but assumed it to be a ordinary fly and squashes it.
• Lock-and-Load Montage: Used when Dexter suits up and boards his Humongous Mecha.
• Look Behind You: In order to evade his abandoned creations in "Lab of the Lost", Dexter blurts out, "Look, it's R2-D2!"
• Loser Friend Puzzles Outsiders: In the crossover "Dyno-Might", Dexter, recruited to fix Dynomutt after a mission gone wrong, is appalled at his ditziness and creates a Darker and Edgier replacement. Blue Falcon calls him out for this when he learns, saying that Dynomutt "wasn't just a goofy idiot sidekick; he was a go-go dog person!"
• Lots of Luggage: The titular character decides to cope with being away from his electronics for a family fishing trip by bringing along an inflatable laboratory. Though being inflatable, none of the buttons actually work.
• Loud Sleeper Gag: The end of "Quiet Riot" has Dexter falling asleep under Dee Dee's bed, causing her to develop a sleepless night due to his snoring.
• Low Clearance: There's an episode where Dexter worries so much about his short height after he wasn't allowed into a rollercoaster ride that he creates some Applied Phlebotinum to make himself taller. His height continues to increase until he's way taller than the average adult. When he's finally on the ride, the screen cuts to black right before his head hits the first clearance.
• Luke, I Am Your Father: Hilariously parodied in "The Muffin King", when Dexter is told this by his own father, so of course it's true.
  Dexter: [gasps] That is not possible! Oh, wait, no, you're right.

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