Believe it or not, being cornered by the news, an Animal Wrongs Group, a SWAT team, and the schoolyard bully around a T-Rex skeleton is only scratching the surface for what our hero gets himself into.
The Incredible Worlds of Wally McDoogle is a Christian book series by Bill Myers (also known for his work on McGee and Me!), which follow the strange adventures of the titular Wally McDoogle, the world's most accident-prone kid, and his friends, the greedy Wall Street and Big Eater Opera, as they go on wild adventures either at home or abroad.
The books also include B-plots involving the superhero stories Wally writes on his trusty computer Ol' Betsy, a Christianity-derived aesop the three learn, and a heaping helping of amusing injuries along the way.
The series ran for 28 books, during which Wally has gone to summer camp, saved his town, been a stuntman, turned invisible, wrangled a giant tarantula, became a cheeseburger...yeah, it's that type of series.
For more works by the same author, see Secret Agent Dingledorf and His Trusty Dog Splat.
This series provides examples of:
- Added Alliterative Appeal: The titles of the books consistently started doing this with book 5: My Life As Dinosaur Dental Floss.
- All Just a Dream: My Life As A Toasted Time Traveler, My Life As a Splatted Flat Quarterback, and My Life As a Stupendously Stomped Soccer Star.
- Amusement Park of Doom: While Fantasmo World in My Life as a Bigfoot Breath Mint is just your typical Disney World-Expy, it winds up becoming this when Wally forgets his slushie in the main ride control-room, resulting in it shorting out the system and causing all the rides to go haywire. Chaos Ensues.
- Annoying Younger Sibling: Carrie, Wally's little sister, who rather comes across as a Sally Expy
- Bad Future: My Life As A Toasted Time Traveler. It wound up just being a dreamed-up one, fortunately.
- Bound and Gagged: Happens in several of the books.
- Brand X: Opera's favorite potato chips are always referred to as "Chippy Chipper Potato Chips".
- Broken Pedestal: Wally's Uncle Max, a famous stuntman, in My Life as a Bigfoot Breath Mint to Wally himself. At first, Max seems like the cool guy everyone (including Wally) thinks he is. As the book goes on, though, it becomes clear that Max is just a shallow, selfish scumbag who only lives and cares for himself (and is a target of loan sharks), to the point that he leaves Wally to drown in a flooded stadium just to save his own skin then tells the media that he saved Wally, when it was actually Wally's dad who
risked his life to save Wally. Needless to say, Wally isn't happy when this happens. - The Bully: Gary is this over the whole series, though some books have their own one-shot bullies such as Maddog in My Life As A Human Hockey Puck.
- Cerebus Retcon: Seems to have been the idea behind Wally's brothers' and Opera's respective backstories in My Life as a Splatted-Flat Quarterback, though since the events of the book turn out to be All Just a Dream, it's suggested that it could have very well been all just in Wally's imagination.
- Chew Toy: Basically, the whole premise of the series is that Wally is an extreme one of these.
- Characterization Marches On: The male "Save The Snails" terrorist. In My Life as Dinosaur Dental Floss, he was an effeminate momma's boy. When he showed up later in the series, in book 16, he was basically a Mugsy expy, complete with a Simpleton Voice. When the terrorists reappeared in book 23, however, he reverted back to the aforementioned momma's boy persona.
- Christmas Episode: My Life As Reindeer Roadkill. My Life as a Belching Baboon also takes place around Christmas, but is primarily focused on the McDoogle family going on a missions trip to Africa to bring Christmas to folks there.
- Clark Kenting: Parodied along with a whole host of Superhero Tropes in Wally's stories.
- Wall Street, as revealed in book 3.
- Gary in book 1.
- Darker and Edgier: My Life As Crocodile Junkfood was considerably darker than any of the previous books as well as any of the subsequent books, presenting the reader with several cases of Family-Unfriendly Violence and at least one Tear Jerker moment.
- My Life As Polluted Pond Scum, while not on the same level as Crocodile Junkfood was also considerably more serious than many of the other books, as it featured the fate of Wally's town being at stake, some rather shady goings on, and several characters nearly die in some rather violent ways.
- My Life As A Toasted Time Traveler is Nightmare Fuel. The consequences of Wally messing with his past to fix a single humiliating accident leads to a Bad Future where Wally turns more and more evil and eventually turns into a wheelchair-bound morbidly obese evil dictator while his former friends are left to starve to death, kills everyone in the world except for himself out of depression, and then decides to travel back in time to murder his past self as a form of suicide as he comes to hate his own existence. And poor Wally's past self has to watch all this happen in first person after he accidently jumps into the body of this future self and mentally time travels further and further into the Bad Future as his body becomes more and more unhealthy with each skip forward and is increasingly horrified by his actions.
- Denser and Wackier: Book 5 was the first case of this. From that point, the books in the series would alternate; some plots being relatively plausible and some just being insane.
- Embarrassing Nickname: Gary the Gorilla, which is also his Berserk Button.
- Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": Even school officials and the kids' parents. We do eventually find out that Opera's real name is Oliver in My Life As a Human Hockey Puck, but Wall Street's real name is never revealed.
- Extreme Sports Plot: Book 21, My Life as a Skysurfing Skateboarder, is themed around a skateboarding competition.
- Fat Best Friend: Opera, who is rarely seen without a bag of potato chips in hand.
- Forced Transformation: My Life As A Haunted Hamburger, Hold the Pickles. Yes, Wally does get turned into a giant hamburger, though whether he actually became a hamburger is left up in the air.
- Future Me Scares Me: The future Wally becomes a dictator who gets meaner and meaner before having everyone killed. Oh, and he's a Eldritch Abomination, too. Again, this was thankfully just in a dream.
- Freudian Trio: Junk-food munching soft-hearted Opera is The Id, ruthless, intelligent Corrupt Corporate Executive With A Heart Of Gold in the making Wall Street is The Super Ego, and Wally is The Ego.
- Grand Finale: Book 11: My Life As Polluted Pond Scum.
Didn't stop the series from continuing, though; albeit under a new publisher.
- Heel–Face Turn: Wally's superhero stories usually end with the villain becoming good. The only exceptions are Lizard Lips in My Life As Alien Monster Bait and Toxoid Breath in My Life As A Broken Bungee Cord. (These are the second and third books respectively in the series, making this a case of Early-Installment Weirdness.)
- Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: "My Life as...(something)"
- In Another Man's Shoes:
- My Life As a Blundering Ballerina: Wall Street and Wally get into a fight over who has the easier life, so they switch lives for a day, doing their various chores, errands, and other such things. In the end, neither can reach a definitive conclusion over who has it worse.
- In the more literal sense: My Life As a Splatted Flat Quarterback, which involves Wally unwittingly flying into the lives and bodies of the people he makes fun of, including the crotchety old school janitor, the local snooty rich kid, Opera, one of his twin brothers, a rock star, and finally a quarterback on the school football team. The whole ordeal turns out to be All Just a Dream, however.
- Involuntary Shapeshifting: The climax of My Life as Invisible Intestines. Wally is accidentally turned invisible, and the process of turning him re-visible goes wrong, resulting in Wally morphing into an orange, an eraser, a Barney doll, a glass of water, a pair of glasses, a candy bar, and a penny before finally returning to normal.
- Jerk Jock:
- Wally's older brothers can be this on occasion, usually via annoying pranks more than anything else.
- My Life as A Cowboy Cowpie features a wealthy, good-looking fellow camper at the cowboy camp setting of the book named Chad Diamond, whom Wall Street develops a crush on. It's gets cleared pretty fast that Chad has it in for Wally, pulling several pranks on him over the course of the story, but it's hinted that he may be nicer than he seems... or not. It turns out that he likes to pretend to be the ideal boyfriend to girls, only to embarrass the girl he's with in front of their families by acting like he doesn't know them when the girl introduces them, then laugh when the girl gets distraught afterwards. Wall Street finds this out the hard way. He winds up learning his lesson when he goes through a big-time Humiliation Conga that nearly gets him killed in the climax.
- Karma Houdini: James Blond in Book 14, although he and Wally parted on friendly terms
- Kids Shouldn't Watch Horror Films: My Life As a Haunted Hamburger opens with Wally, Wall Street, and Opera managing to sneak into an R-rated horror/sci-fi movie called Body-Stealing Ghosts from Jupiter. Wally winds up scared by it, to say the least; he spends most of the film "hiding under [his] theater seat, praying for [his] life, and getting [his] face stuck to the floor on somebody's old gummy worms", and afterwards he claims to have had seventeen nightmares from it and has the movie adversely affect his initial attempts to write his obligatory superhero story. (Ironically, unlike most cases of this trope, we never find out if Wally's parents found out about this or if they punished Wally for it.)
- Lethal Chef: Wally's little sister, Carrie. It's a running gag throughout the series that she is this, as, when it's her turn to cook, she dishes out stuff like candied Brussels sprouts, cauliflower cobbler, and boiled ice cream. Wally is also implied to be this in book #24. At one point he cooks breakfast for Opera's parents and not only burns the toast, eggs, and bacon, but even their orange juice.
- Lethal Klutz: Wally is this to the extent that he's apparently been declared a "national disaster area." Whatever happens on his misadventures, you can bet that massive property damage and possible police intervention are sure to follow.
- Made of Iron: In reality, Wally would probably be dead ten times over from all the injuries he sustains over the course of the series. In My Life As A Tarantula Toe Tickler, for example, he survives a ten thousand foot drop from the sky after flying up that high with giant ears.
- Never My Fault: The main plot of Book 14: My Life As A Screaming Skydiver centers around Wally learning to avert this and take responsibility for his own actions.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Given how much of a clumsy guy Wally is, he's (either indirectly or directly) caused quite a few of the problems he has to solve. To whit:
- My Life As A Computer Cockroach: Long story short, Wally's antics with his computer, which now has the ability to affect reality with what is typed into it, ultimately lead up to him inadvertently causing the Y2K bug.
- My Life As A Stupendously Stomped Soccer Star: After a bad soccer accident, Wally is given the opportunity to change how his life is at the end of every day, but the changes keep causing worse and worse problems until it results in global chaos. note Fortunately, this is one of the books that has an All Just a Dream ending.
- No Sense of Humor: Pretty much everyone in Wally's superhero stories (usually the superhero) groans at "bad" jokes, even the ones that are funny. Everyone in the "Real World" is also this to a lesser extent. And they all think that the reader has no sense of humor too, expecting you to groan at every joke. (Something it shares with sister series McGee and Me!.)
- No Fourth Wall: Aside from Wally talking directly to the reader, the events of previous books are sometimes referred to by their respective book titles.
- Running Gag: Gary trying to coax Wally into surrendering to the authorities throughout book 5.
- Save the Villain: Book 14: My Life as a Screaming Skydiver: The spy that Wally has been unknowingly helping accidentally ejects himself out of his own plane without a parachute. Wally dives out after him and hands him an extra parachute.
- Book 19, My Life as a Cowboy Cowpie: Wally, Opera, Wall Street's revenge scheme on their complete and utter scumbag of a fellow camper Chad Diamond goes horribly wrong, and Chad is left in danger of being torn apart by an angry bull. Despite Chad having been a terrible person to them throughout the book, they still risk their own well-being to save him.
- Series Continuity Error: In book #18 "Beat-Up Basketball Backboard", Wall Street mentions making money off of Wally since kindergarten, but Wally's only known her (and Opera) since the first book, where they were twelve.
- During the events of the same book, Wally reminisces about his misadventures...thinking about how he saved the town from being flooded back in "Polluted Pond Scum"...except he actually saved the water from being contaminated by a disgruntled sewage employee who was in cahoots with a shady MegaCorp rather than merely preventing a flood.
- Skewed Priorities: My Life As Dinosaur Dental Floss: Wall Street gives away her hiding place to the terrorists when she tries to catch a dollar bill that one of said terrorists dropped.
- "Shaggy Dog" Story: Book 5. Wally has gone through absolute hell to keep terrorists from getting their hands on a vat of mysterious liquid which both he and they are convinced is a dangerous chemical weapon; it turns out that they're both wrong, it's just a jar of rhubarb sauce.
- Shared Universe: Another book series by Bill Myers, Secret Agent Dingledorf, followed the misadventures of Wally's cousin, Bernie Dingledorf. Bloodhounds Inc., yet another book series by Bill Myers, also takes place in a town called Middleton, but it's not stated whether or not it's the same Middleton that Wally lives in.
- Show Within a Show: In each book, Wally writes a superhero story, the complete text of which we are given.
- Status Quo Is God: A recurring plot-line is that Wally's dad wants Wally to 'be a man' and that writing seems lame. Come book #11, where Dad, after Wally saves the town, accepts that Wally wants to be a writer and thinks he's a man. Unfortunately, after that book, Dad's back to wanting Wally to be a man and that writing seems lame.
- Gary the Gorilla, the local bully, also gets some Character Development in the first book, and by the end even seems to be becoming friends with Wally, but for whatever reason, this is ignored as, in all proceeding books, he's back to bullying everyone.
- Take That!: There's quite a few in book 18, such as this rather harsh one at Blue's Clues:Wally: [[Wall Street not making money off of me]] would be like water flowing uphill, or snow in July, or for them to make a show about a weird blue dog that gives clues.
- Took a Level in Dumbass: Opera started off being a fairly smart kid, but as the series went on, his intelligence grew lower and lower until he reached Patrick Star levels in the last couple of books.
- Took a Level in Jerkass: Wall Street in book 21. "Skysurfing Skateboarder". Here Wall Street couldn't care less what plans Wally had with Opera and Little Buddy Leroy, she just keeps telling Wally that if you want to win, you gotta put yourself before everyone else, and continuously pushes him to prepare for the skateboarding race whether he wants to or not. She does this more than once during the book. Fortunately, she returns to being a Jerk with a Heart of Gold in proceeding books.
- Two Guys and a Girl: The main trio fit both the gender roles and the trope, but while Wall Street is the girl, she's The Lancer, while Opera is The Heart.
- Where the Hell Is Springfield?: It's never shown were Wally's town is, but there are several implications that Middleton may be in Ohio or another state in the Midwest.
