Eye Glasses - Television Tropes & Idioms

In many cartoons, characters that wear glasses seem to have their whole eyes fused into the lens. Their eyelids are nowhere to be seen, often all that is seen are pupils and the lens. Often the pupils go squinty when the character blinks, and the frames of the glasses have the ability to move around similar to an Expressive Mask.

Presumably this is simply because drawing eyelids inside the glass frames is rather difficult.

Not to be confused with this

Examples

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Mr. Owl.

Anime & Manga

Nobita from Doraemon.

Comic Strips

Calvin And Hobbes: Calvin's dad. Anyone who wears glasses, really.
Daryl from Baby Blues.

Films — Animation

Disney's Atlantis: The Lost Empire averts this with Milo (though briefly played straight during the viewing of an old film reel depicting his childhood), but plays this straight during a brief scene about halfway through the film where Kida actually takes off his glasses because of her curiosity and puts them on her face.

Films — Live-Action

In the 2005 film of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Hummakavula wears glasses that apparently magnify his eyes many times. Then he takes them off to reveal that the magnified eyes are in the glasses themselves, and his own eye sockets are sunken, empty pits. This is the first sign to the protagonists that he is more sinister than he appears.

Puppet Shows

The Muppet Show: Scooter's◊ pupils are attached to the glasses instead of his head.
Sesame Street has Herbert Birdsfoot and Don Music.

Video Games

Iggy Koopa from the Super Mario Bros. series games.

Web Comics

Homestuck
- John Egbert. His glasses go so far as to not even be connected to anything.
- Bro's Triangle Shades act like this as well, despite not having visible pupils.
- Jade kind of averts it however, because her eyelashes are visible through the glasses.
- Lampshaded in the 2012-02-16 animation, where Brobot slaps Jake's Eye Glasses off. His pupils go with them.
Several characters in Everyday Heroes have this, most notably Carrie. One good example is seen here.
Donald Donlan in Gunnerkrigg Court has some quite expressive eyeglasses. A nice counterpart to his Eyes Always Shut wife.

Western Animation

Dexter and his dad from Dexters Laboratory.
Daryl (again) from the Baby Blues animated series.
Averted on King of the Hill where all the glass frames are drawn independently of the eyelids.
Played with on Family Guy where most characters' glasses just happen to be the same size and shape of their eyeballs. Meg's large glasses are noticably bigger than her eyes though. Also lampshaded: In "The King Is Dead," Peter takes off his glasses and his pupils stay attached to the lenses.
Sherman from Peabody and Sherman.
Arthur Read.
Millhouse from The Simpsons.
Duckman. His glasses are his eyes: They have eyebrows. [1]◊ Very odd when he lampshades it by taking the glasses off to clean them: his face is blank.
Coop the Chicken from Yin Yang Yo.
There's an episode of Phineas And Ferb in which Candace puts on glasses to show how serious and focused she is. And her upper and lower lids show up when she blinks and changes expressions.
There's a kind of variation in the Canadian short The Big Snit, where the wife's pupils get stuck in odd positions and she actually removes her eyes as if they were a pince-nez and shakes them rapidly to unstick the pupils. Lampshaded in the following exchange:
Husband: Why are you always shaking your eyes?
Wife: I... I don't shake them like I used to.
Husband: Yes you do! You shake 'em here and shake 'em there! Why dontcha go join some stupid shake 'n' rock 'n' roll band?
Nora Wakeman from My Life As A Teenage Robot has the pupils that blink variation, but her eyelids also show through her lenses.
Steve from American Dad.
Dib from Invader Zim. The lenses even disappear as he closes his eyes. His also have no arms and wire-thin frames. Some fans didn't even realize he wore glasses until Zim mentioned it, at which point we suddenly realized what that narrow line connecting his eyes was supposed to be.
Pa Grape from Veggie Tales. Despite wearing glasses, he actually doesn't have eyes.
Andy from Squirrel Boy.
Inez from Cyberchase.
Lizzie Devine from Codename Kids Next Door.
Carl from The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron is an odd case, because the 3-D animation makes it possible to see around his glasses and he still has pupils without eyes.
Principal Brown from The Amazing Worldof Gumball.
Harold and Beth from the ''Total Drama'' series.
Susan and Mary Test.