Now, you're probably thinking, "How could a goofy, satirical, parody-esque show like Totally Spies! possibly have scary stuff in it?" Oh, trust us. It found plenty of ways. And we're gonna check them out right here.
As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.
- The capabilities of C.H.A.D. can unnerve people if one thinks about it. It could hack into just about anything, including American missile bases and even human people, both of which are neither simple nor easy. Fortunately, it was only concerned about targeting the creator's classmates and schools. Imagine if it somehow grew beyond those simple targets or had access to more dangerous weapons, say drones or nuclear ICBMs. Heck, C.H.A.D. threatens to upload itself into the Pentagon's computers when Adam attempts to stop it. Thank goodness he poured water on it before that could happen.
- Dr. Gelee’s plan to plunge the planet back into the Ice Age by freezing the planet’s core, unlike most of the other villains who are doing it for such petty reasons. His motives are the classic hatred of humans for polluting the planet. So of course he tries freezing the entire planet to make humanity go extinct. Of course this would wipe out not just mankind but virtually all life.
- Dr. Inga Bittersweet's Passion Patties would have made anyone who ate them so addicted, they wouldn't be able to stop eating until they exploded!
- The same thing goes for Ulrich Wernerstein's Bulky Bars.
- Pretty much all of Helga Von Guggen's antics. In her first appearance, she turned a boatload of people into "furlings" in an attempt to make a new line of fur coats. She already did it to her lawyer. In her second appearance, she made a new line of clothing that gradually crushes anyone wearing them to death.
- The reason she invented the crushing clothes? To straight up murder everyone at a fashion show by tricking them into wearing her clothes and then revealing herself so she could watch them die.
- Sebastian Saga's origin: he was once a rock guitarist until he lost his left hand in a freak pyrotechnics accident, forcing him to wear a prosthetic. Judging by the looks of horror on Alex and Sam's faces when they see the footage of said accident, it was not pretty.
- It's Played for Laughs, but W.O.O.H.P. is not only enormously powerful, but also wildly incompetent. One episode involves the Spies being framed, and Jerry's first action is to try to put chips in their brains to modify their behavior without questioning.
- Of note, the crime they were framed for? Robbing a bank.
- In the same episode where the girls are framed, we're treated to more scary images of the girls' clones growing in tanks along with a flashback that showed how Macker the Safecracker, the creator of the clones, became a cyborg: during a previous mission, he fell off a railing and grabbed the girls' hair in a failed attempt to get back up.
- Another example of W.O.O.H.P.'s incompetence is that they don't always make sure former W.O.O.H.P. employees who have checkered pasts won't come back for revenge such as Tim Scam, Dr. Vomesa, Myrna Beesbottom, Diminutive Smalls, Boogie Gus and Geraldine Husk.
- Another example of W.O.O.H.P.’s incompetence is that villains constantly escape from their prison half of the time without Jerry noticing. All want to get revenge on the girls for doing their jobs. Alex at least calls Jerry out on this one.
- This one is Jerry’s fault but him deciding to leave three teenage girls in charge of W.O.O.H.P. many things go wrong in Jerry’s absence, fortunately nothing life threatening, what’s worse the girls are blamed for this.
- A Spy Is Born Part II features a disturbingly simple death trap. Alex is tied up and left hanging off the side of a skyscraper, held only by a rope, oneside tied to a door, the other held in her mouth. If she screams, she dies.
- One of the scariest episodes is "Nature Nightmare". What's the bad guy? A killer forest with man eating trees that very slowly eat people alive!
- Mandy becomes this when, in an episode that takes place in the far future, she becomes a multi-media empress who plans to hypnotize the human population into becoming like her while also worshipping her. It's so creepy hearing women and teenage girls mimic her mannerisms, nasally voice and annoying, goat-like laugh. All this happened because she became a school news reporter after breaking one of her nails! In fact, if it weren't for Alex messing with Jerry's time machine, Mandy would have won! The horror...
- Tim Scam's plot in his debut episode involved stealing all the Earth's water unless he was given a large sum of money. He was willing to risk destroying the planet just for a quick buck! And when his plan failed, he turned his weapon on the girls, draining them dry of their bodily fluids.
- WOOHP Island, a holding facility for particularly dangerous villains. The unique occupants we meet are are The Surgeon, a man who intends to deform every face in the world through surgery one at a time; Gargantua, a colossal armoured monster whose stated goal is simply destroying the planet; and The Alienator, a super quick blind creature that eats people, tracking them by sound.
- Gargantua is particularly creepy as it has no clear backstory. It's not stated to be an alien, but an x-ray reveals it to be vaguely human-like under its armour, bringing up another possibility.
- A number of previous villains are seen on the island as well. Though they are seen being evacuated, the island explodes at the end, and nothing more is said on the matter. Ouch.
- Principal Smith from “Soul Collector.” The man is actually over 800 years old and has been using a set of mystic jewels to steal youth for centuries. If thinking about how many people he killed in the process isn’t enough then watch the episode til the very end. When Smith’s plan is undone and the jewel is destroyed, there’s nothing left of Smith except a pile of dust. The girls and even Jerry are clueless on what happened to the man but the viewer sure isn’t. It’s easy to forget that this show actually had a body count.
- It gets really scary when a villain turns out to be someone close to the girls' age, like Felicity Fences, a spoiled heiress who kidnapped handsome men to compete in her gladiator games. Or Arnold, a friend/acquaintance of the girls who came across a magic ring that allowed him to become a stronger, handsome man by stealing the beauty and strength from people's bodies and turning them into nerds.
- John Smith. It turns out, this guy was actually more than 500 years old and he achieved this by draining the life energy out of people's souls, making them feel old and feeble. So old and feeble, their bones are fragile, their glandular functions are slow, their mental alertness is dangerously low and their teeth start falling out of their mouths! And when he finally got his comeuppance, WHOOP didn't even arrest him. Why? He died and crumbled to dust! He was one of two people to die onscreen!
- The second person to die onscreen was Max Exterminus, a prize-winning exterminator who just gave up trying to kill all the bugs in the neighborhood, let alone all the bugs in the world and turned himself into a cockroach-human hybrid and did the same to Alex, wanting her to be his queen. His plan? Destroy all life on earth except for bugs with a special venom-filled rocket. When his plan failed, Max didn't let go of the rocket, declaring it his life's work and died as it crashed to the ground.
- The villain from "Evil Hair Salon", Felicia Mane, is revealed to have made her wigs by dipping her kidnapped victims' hair in a formula that makes it grow longer while also draining their life in the process. And she planned on killing her victims after they were harvested of their hair.
- In the episode, "Abductions", an ambassador began kidnapping Nobel prize winners in order to drain their intelligence and place them in his son's head so that he would not be picked on the way he was. The problem? The poor kid's head started swelling up like a balloon with each brain added to his own and it's quite clear he was in pain; his head would have exploded had the spies not reversed the machine!
- In "Model Citizens", the girls uncover the truth of the enigmatic model agency, Picture Perfect: they capture female models and use a machine to swap body parts with their less-than-attractive female minions, creating an army of perfect models to destroy the competition. The problem is the process isn't even that "perfect". The "perfect" models have to hide the fact that they look less like models and more like the Bride of Frankenstein. One of Picture Perfect's models even accidentally loses an ear that belonged to a "donor"! Worse still, later in the episode, Picture Perfect creates a new version of the machine that would have made the process irreversible.
- Not only that, after the girls are captured, they and other models are being taken on a plane to dump them in shark-infested waters! Just what happened to the other kidnapped models who we didn't see?
- The reason why Tuesday Tate, the founder of Picture Perfect, wanted to destroy the model industry? She used to be a model herself until a lion ate her leg during a circus themed modeling shoot gone horribly wrong, forcing her to wear a prosthetic. Alex points out she could have just stolen a new leg with the Modelizer (especially the permanent variant of the machine), but she just says, "True. But my plan sounds a lot more fun."
- The SUDS from "Totally Busted". If this stuff were to enter the atmosphere, the whole world would have been turned into crazy spy-hunting assassins. And it even works on spies as well, meaning spies infected by it would kill each other.
- The episode, "The O.P.", was basically a parody of The Stepford Wives, but instead of wives being replaced with perfect and obedient robots, you got overprotective parents using a device disguised as a clock tower to control the minds of their own children! Where did they even get that technology?!
- Considering that 80% of missions, incidents and events takes place in Beverly Hills, one of the most richest cities in USA, it only makes sense that people and super-villains are rich and loaded enough to produce these weapons and technologies.
- And then if you look at Real Life cults and toxic families where gaslighting is used more than toilet paper, you can easily see the kind of people who'd be capable of brainwashing their children to behaving the way they want short of the lack of technology to do so.
- Captain Hayes is every celebrity's worst nightmare. No matter what job he has, a jet pilot, a submarine captain, or an airship pilot; this guy's true goal is to gather up all the celebrities he can find and keep them for himself. And he is very psychotic about keeping them; in his first appearance, he intended to keep a group of celebrities trapped forever in a futuristic passenger plane. In his second appearance, he tried to flood the earth so that only he and his menagerie of celebrities survive. In his final appearance, he stole the talents of celebrities he kidnapped in his airship.
- Jerry's twin brother, Terrance. A man who won't let go of a childhood grudge, he surgically altered his face so he would distance himself from his brother and destroy everything that he stood for. What started this grudge? Jerry and Terrance both cheated on a fourth grade test, but when they got caught, the former turned on the latter. Terrance never forgave him ever since.
- Danger TV is a really intense episode about an evil game show host who forces other celebrities to participate in fatal daredevil acts... against their will! Whenever the video of him sitting in his little green room appears he ends his spiels by laughing like a madman, too.
- Not to mention the host is basically a recoloured version of Vladimir Kozyrev, the Russian guy from a previous episode who created the Little Ann dolls to make people act immature.
- Nadia the Romanian gymnastics coach in "Evil Gymnasts". She tried to cheat so her country would win the tournament... which doesn't sound too bad on paper, but it's how she did it that makes it especially bad... she used monkey DNA and switched it up with the DNA of the gymnasts on her team, giving them unnatural gymnastics abilities. It is also creepy when we see these women charge at Sam and Alex later, with Clover joining them.
- In the dentist episode, a Bulgarian nurse (formerly a figure skater, but now under mind control) has pointy teeth and wields some sort of small torture device. She takes Sam away. Oh, and she does all of this while eating a hole in the wall and cackling non-stop like a crazy person.
- What did the evil dentist do that turned him into a villain? He gave the President of the United States of America a tooth whitening formula that rotted his teeth! Understandably, he lost his dentistry license and then went insane.
- Manny's plot to destroy Mega Mani Mania? Kidnap his old clients and give them nails that not only brainwash them but also grow into claws as long as Freddy Krueger's knives!
- Sometimes even one shot characters become villains. For instance, Shirley, a yoga instructor from season 2, returns as a villain in season 3 to destroy a popular yoga/sushi restaurant by kidnapping her former students (including Sam, Clover, Alex and Mandy) and using a "chi machine" to brainwash them into becoming her servants while at the same time, giving them the strength and agility of a character from Shonen Jump.
- The owner of Das Coffee Haus in Vancouver. He has a strange appearance that is sort of creepy, and he plans to make his coffee restauraunt noticed... by flooding the streets with coffee. He ties up the spies and Mandy and tries to drown them in the coffee, and almost floods all of Vancouver!
- Shelly Junglelove, the Brazilian plant lover, has giant venus flytraps that almost swallow the spies whole several times. She plans to overrun the world with said plants, as she hates modern culture and technology and is literally wild.
- Out of all the villains on the show, there is one who didn't get arrested or killed: Ariel, the leader of the Sisterhood from "W.O.W.". They are essentially a more violent version of the Amazons from Greco-Roman mythology. What is the Sisterhood's goal? To eradicate all men (probably not in the literal sense since they still need men to reproduce) and all women who are not Sisterhood members (definitely in the literal sense). Ariel "awakens" the warrior spirit in these chosen ones by using a magic gem on her champion belt. Imagine minding your own business when all of a sudden, a random woman or even a female co-worker, friend or relative suddenly starts attacking everyone around her no matter what gender, save for those helping her. Sam happens to be a descendant of the Sisterhood on her mother's side of the family. And even though her plans were thwarted by W.O.O.H.P., Ariel is still out there...
- Imagine if you're a descendant of the Sisterhood you're going about your day when all of the sudden you are without warning turned into a fighter who goes after everyone you know and love all because of a family relation, and a crazy wrestler woman.
