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The Short Guy with Glasses
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Usually a boy who is much younger than the rest of the group, but is technically the smartest. This kid always has a plan ( and a back up plan) when it comes down to it. Often wears green for some reason. Can be The Runt at the End.
See also Shorter Means Smarter. Potentially overlaps with Meganekko, especially when the character is female.
Not to be confused with That Guy with the Glasses.
Examples
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Anime & Manga
- Megane from Gatekeepers ("Specs" in the North American dub), as seen by the name.
- Negi Springfield in Mahou Sensei Negima!, among other roles.
- Voltron had Pidge (Hiroshi Suzuishi) from (Go Lion) and Chip (Yasuo Mutsu) from Dairugger XV.
- Minoru Kokubunji from Chobits.
- Kenny from Beyblade
- Izzy from Digimon Adventure. Only without the glasses.
- Max from Pokémon Advanced Challenge, Advanced Battle, and Battle Frontier.
- Max is usually only appearing to know what he's talking about, though. The real Smart Guy of the group is Brock.
- Narusawa Kazuma from Tantei Gakuen Q.
- Sho Marufuji/Syrus Truesdale from Yu-Gi-Oh! GX wins this trope.
- Rekuta from Duel Masters is practically the same character. With a few more Megaton Punch sequences.
- Albert Pitt from ARIA fits this trope to a T. He's short enough to make those who don't know him personally think that he's almost four or five years younger than he actually is.
- Conan Edogawa. He (as a 6-year-old) is very small for his age, even smaller than the girls. But subverted as a teen, as his glasses is only a disguise, and as Shinichi Kudo his height is appropriate for a teenage boy.
- Partially subverted with Fullmetal Alchemist's Kain Fuery — he fits the description and is the Communications expert, but Vato Falman and Heymans Breda are the smarter ones in Col. Mustang's group.
- Marucho in Bakugan.
- Insector Haga/Weevil Underwood from Yu-Gi-Oh!. A minor Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain who nonetheless fits this perfectly as he is very short with Nerd Glasses, is a cunning schemer, and he always wears green. He's also younger than most of the major duelists, starting the series at age 14 and ending it at age 15.
- Mariya from Eden No Ori.
- Daichi from ''Kotoura-san. He is, however, merely Older Than He Looks. Per the trope he also acts as The Smart Guy to at least Yuriko, if not the massage wand as well.
- Chibi Maruko Chan: Nagayama, the book-smart kid in Maruko's class.
Comics
Films
- Murder by Numbers, though So Bad, It's Good (or horrible, take your pick) has the delightful Justin Pendleton. Admittedly, he only seems to need the glasses when he's reading (or when he's trying to act a teeny bit more like an emo Nathan Leopold) but there you go. Smarter, shorter, primmer, but probably not younger — and, of course, in possession of an Evil Plan. A shared Evil Plan, but nevertheless.
- Glasses, the smallest and youngest crow in Dumbo, and the one that supplies the Magic Feather (from his tail!) wears large rose-tinted glasses.
- In The Avengers, Bruce Banner is recruited for his brilliance as a nuclear physicist; he needs thick glasses to read and is the physically smallest of the main male cast. His alter ego on the other hand...
Literature
Live Action TV
- Classic game show emcee Bill Cullen, of such shows as The Fifties' Price Is Right, To Tell the Truth, and The $25,000 Pyramid. Notable for being a real Deadpan Snarker.
- Corporal Walter "Radar" O'Reilly from Mash.
- Hiro from Heroes.
- It helps that Hiro's actor Masi Oka is an actual genius, with an IQ of about eleventy-billion.
- Lex from Flight 29 Down, definitely.
- Reid, in flashback to his kid genius days on Criminal Minds.
- George from Seinfeld is the biggest subversion of The Smart Guy part of the trope, as he's not the brightest of the ensemble, and often makes thick-witted or mean-spirited mistakes that snowball humiliatingly. While on occasion he does have a clever scheme that actually works, it somehow or other blows up in his face. He's out-schemed by Newman, the Other Short Guy With Glasses who plays the trope a little straighter, but it's less due to 'smarts' than a cunning more vicious than the others are willing to get.
- Charlie Eppes on Numb3rs
- Simon Tam on Firefly
- Blair Sandburg, sometimes on The Sentinel
Video Games
Web Comics
- Nick from General Protection Fault.
- Jyrras is definitely short, and he wears glasses, even though he doesn't need them; it's an image thing. He's also the one with the greatest technical aptitude.
- Tedd in El Goonish Shive is the shortest of the group, but isn't any younger. He also doesn't need to wear glasses; he even recently stopped wearing them completely.
Western Animation
- Rafael, from Transformers Prime. He's the smallest human in the show by a significant margin.
- Albert a.k.a. Presto from the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon fits the visual style and personality, but the magic item he received from Dungeonmaster was a magic hat from which he could pull anything he wanted. Unfortunately, the hat was something of a Literal Genie with a trend towards notoriously random interpretations; as a result, he never had a plan he could rely on.
- Honker Muddlefoot in Darkwing Duck.
- Dexter of Dexters Laboratory.
- Jeremie from Code Lyoko, though admittedly he's only shorter than two-fifths of the main cast. (He is the youngest, though.)
- It's worth pointing out that, while he doesn't wear green, the towers that he controls on Lyoko are.
- Lexington from Gargoyles in spirit, being short and green but lacking the glasses. He does have unusually large eyes, however.
- Kevin French from the short-lived Mission Hill. In fact, his character was based on the afore-mentioned Dilton Doiley.
- Chester McTech from Beverly Hills Teens.
- Brainiac 5 from Legion Of Superheroes. Amusingly, actually is green.
- Sam AKA Squid of Rocket Power.
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