Dumb Muscle / Live-Action TV

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• Angel: The Beast in Season 4. Just the fact that he has a long-term plan other than mindless slaughter and wanton mass destruction is a sign that he's working for someone else.
  • This is zigzagged with Gunn, who seemed typecast as the dumb muscle (and he is aware of this). That is, through the end of Season 4. The upgrade that Wolfram and Hart gives him is to make him into the brains of the outfit, the Ace Attorney.
  • The half-demon Groosalugg is in his physical strength on the same level as Angel, a vampire over 200 years old (vampires in Buffyverse are getting Stronger with Age, and Angel is really badass). He is also the unbeaten champion in his homeworld, where he killed numerous demons and never lost a fight. However, it quickly becomes apparent that he is anything but clever. Of course he's not a complete idiot because he left Cordelia when he realized that she actually loves Angel.
• Babylon 5: The Legend of the Rangers. "My name is Tirk. I carry heavy things."
• Breaking Bad: Saul hires Huell as a bodyguard due to his intimidating size, when he actually needs to protect Saul, he fails at his job. He also easily falls for Hank's fake story without realising he's being tricked into giving away information.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Glory constantly underestimates her opponents and acts without thinking. The only thing that makes her a threat is that she has a lot of muscle.
• The carnival strongman in Carnivàle is an enormous Manchild.
• Played with on Chuck with John Casey (another Adam Baldwin character). As he's played by all 6'4", 230 lbs of Adam Baldwin, Casey is without question the biggest and strongest member of the team (Zachary Levi is quite tall as well, but not nearly as powerfully built), shown to be able to resist multiple tranq darts, and many bad guys just injure themselves when they try to punch him in the face. He also once ripped an old-style radiator out of a hotel wall after he was cuffed to it and used it as a weapon while still cuffed to it in the subsequent fight. However many laughs are also had at his expense over not being as bright as Chuck and Sarah, even failing an aptitude test miserably with the lowest score ever recorded when he and Chuck are trying to infiltrate a Fulcrum recruiting center. The played with comes in that Casey's is actually closer to average in intelligence, well-trained, and capable of thinking quickly on missions. It's just that many of his associates on the show are unusually intelligent and highly-technical people due to the nature of the assignment, so his main role on the team is acting as the muscle while Chuck and Sarah usually handle the finesse.
• Troy on Community is a Manchild and a former Jerk Jock.
  Jeff: I want you to clear your mind—
  Troy: Done.
• Ogrons, a species of gigantic caveman types used as muscle by the Daleks in the original Doctor Who.
  • Incidentally, in a metafictional in-joke, "OGRON" is the name of the Soviet equivalent of UNIT (Operativnaya Grupo Razvedkoy Obyeddinyonnich Natsii: United Nations Surveillance Operations Group).
• Firefly: Jayne appears to be this at first; a moron whose skills are limited to hitting and shooting stuff. But don't be fooled. Over the course of the show, he's demonstrated that he's a reasonably-cunning planner, a skilled tracker, and a capable pilot. Admittedly, he's not academically bright, but he's very knowledgeable about a lot of practical skills. He's also shown to be an impressive judge of character — seeing through Dobson's lies instantly, for example. There’s also material suggesting that if the show wasn’t cancelled, he’d have been revealed as one of the creators of Blue Sun, a huge, system-wide corporation, but who was kicked out. That could really throw his intelligence into question.
• Game of Thrones:
  • The Eyrie's jailer Mord may even be mentally retarded, but is big and strong enough to be competent at his job. He's also nearly too dumb to bribe.
  • Hodor isn't very intelligent, but he can rip chains off the wall and pulverize the throat of a strong and skilled man. He also stopped a wave of wights pushing down a door to the point the wights had to break the sides of the door and slice him up to advance since they couldn't simply push him down.
  • Lorch is a competent warrior and certainly has his uses...relying on his brain is not one of those uses.
  • Gregor is a killing machine with little to no sense of tactics or restraint, as he's too Ax-Crazy to consider whether his acts of brutality are actually detrimental in the long run. Nor does it seem likely that he cares, it's not like the Lannisters pay him for being smart, his job is to apply Disproportionate Retribution to those who cross the family. After his transformation, Qyburn implies he's even dumber than before as the "experiments" he did to save him affected his mind, and most of his free will appears to be gone, becoming instead an obedient drone.
• Finn from Glee is a six-foot-three athlete who isn't exactly the brightest bulb in the bunch.
• Justified has Coover Bennett, a hulking Mighty Glacier who is also the show's poster boy for arrested emotional development. He acts like he's about eight years old. Get him in a fight, though...
  • The final season introduces Choo-Choo, so named because when he hits you, it's like you've been hit by a train.
• Ryuga Banjo, the Second Rider of Kamen Rider Build, is as dumb as a sack of obsolete encyclopedias and has a mean temper; the title character even explicitly calls him this^note Kinniku baka, literally "muscle idiot". On the other hand, he also has suprising amount of insight and intuition, provided his temper doesn't get in the way.
• Kingdom Adventure: Gorf is one of Magistrate Pitts' guards at Lumia Castle, and he's dimwitted and very easy to trick.
• Adam, the Lab Rat with Super-Strength in Lab Rats. Lampshaded in how it takes a second to come up with a plan to trick him.
• In Li'l Horrors, Duncan Stein (a Frankenstein's Monster) is easily the strongest and dumbest of the Horrors.
• Manhunt (2024): The burly Lewis isn't the brightest of Booth's conspirators; he briefly forgets who the man he's trying to assassinate is, then, when told it's the (U.S.) Secretary of State, he asks, "Which state?"
• Monty Python's Flying Circus: Ken Clean Air System in "Live from the Grill-o-Mat." The "muscle" part obviously comes with being a boxer, and as for the "dumb," his own manager calls him "almost totally stupid." When he comes across a parked car while jogging, he can only think to turn and go back instead of walking around it.
• Clay in The New Normal.
• On Orange Is the New Black, Crazy Eyes considers herself this for Vee.
  Crazy Eyes: She's the brains. I'm the muscle.
• Our Miss Brooks: School athlete Stretch Snodgrass.
• Power Rangers is infamous for turning Super Sentai villains who are either brutes, Genius Bruisers, overweight, or weirdos into stupid expandables.
• While he never actually appeared on camera, the character of Moose Thompson was described this way on The Red Green Show. Red described Moose as being physically stronger than an ox, while mentally it was too close to call.
• Dagwood, the flawed Dagger prototype, from SeaQuest DSV.
• Star Trek has a few races who wear this as their hat.
  • Nausicaans are a minor race who frequently pop up but haven't been examined in great depth. They are portrayed as big, thuggish, and not particularly bright, usually showing up as Space Pirates or hired muscle. That said, they are still a spacefaring race, which implies that they are intelligent enough to invent (or at least reliably utilize) advanced technology.
    Quark: (Seeing two Nausicaans throwing darts at each others' chests and laughing) Doesn't that hurt?
    Brunt: I'm sure it does. Most Nausicaan games do.
  • The Pakleds, in their first appearance on TNG, were just plain dumb without any muscle. Their size was, at least to outward appearances, more obesity than anything else. Their recurrence on Star Trek: Lower Decks is where they fit this trope better; they are just as stupid as they were before, but with a more intimidating physical presence that emphasizes their brute strength.
  • Subverted with the Klingons, the archetypal Proud Warrior Race Guys of the franchise. They're best known for their strength and durable physiology, but that doesn't mean they're stupid. At worst, they can be more prone to letting their bloodthirst or sense of martial honor cloud their reasoning, as evidenced by how Klingon Scientists Get No Respect, but anyone who has met a Klingon scholar knows they are intellectual equals of any other Alpha Quadrant power.
• Ronon from Stargate Atlantis. Played for Laughs at times and sort of justified because of his past. His "plans" often contain simply Stuff Blowing Up or killing the enemy instead of (necessarily) working together and he's very unwilling to try a more intelligent method. However, he seems to work great with McKay.
  "Mission Report: Michael invaded Atlantis. Tried to blow it up. We stopped him. End of report."
• In Supernatural, the Men of Letters saw hunters as brutish but necessary.
• Tales of the Tinkerdee: Taminella's ogre henchman Charlie is definitely not the sharpest tool in the shed: he's stupid enough to call her "Tammy" while they're both disguised, risking blowing their cover, and he even mistakenly clubs Taminella on the head while she's disguised as the princess that Charlie was ordered to clobber and kidnap!
• Red King of Ultra Series fame, beginning with the original Ultraman. While he may be physically powerful enough to tear apart other kaiju limb from limb, his lack of brains means he usually stands no chance against Ultra heroes.
  • A heroic example is Windam, one of Ultraseven's Capsule Kaiju. As a Humongous Mecha, Windam is quite strong and able to spar with other kaiju quite well, but also rather mindless. The alien invaders Seven often faces are quite good at taking advantage of this, with one of them even brainwashing him to attack Ultraseven (who then subdues Windam by making him dizzy).
  • Black King from Return of Ultraman is Red King on steroids. Even stronger than him, and with armored hide capable of surviving nearly any attack, bur even stupider to the point where he can only act under the command of highly intelligent alien invaders, such as Nackle.
  • Doragoris/Doragory from Ultraman Ace is considered the most physically powerful of Yapool's Choju (like Red King, he can literally rip lesser kaiju to shreds), but is also considerably less intelligent than most of them.
  • Ultraman Tiga continues the tradition with Silvergon. He's strong enough overpower Tiga's Power Type and punch holes through a friggin' force field. but when faced with Tiga, his stupidity comes to light as he actually tries to perform Tiga's Finishing Moves and Multiform Balance abilities when it sees the hero do them. Additionally, his terrible eyesight means all Tiga had to do to get the upper hand was simply stand still whenever Silvergon was looking at him.

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