Buck and Buddy is an animated series about the friendship between Buck, a beetle, and Buddy, a stick insect.Sometimes friends, sometimes foes, they are always trying to get what they need to survive, gathering used, useful but mostly useless objects that have been discarded in the various wastelands that they call home. As best of friends they must learn to live, compete and play in the world they find themselves in.
Buck and Buddy provides examples of:
- Ageless Birthday Episode: Hypno-Letch shows Letch the leech celebrating his birthday, and "Surprise!" gives Amy the token female character a birthday, but their ages are never revealed. This is enforced since insects tend to age rather quickly and the show's producers want a floating timeline.
- Anti-Hero: Letch wants to be a good person deep down and is lonely, but has traits of being a villain/bully.
- Anti-Villain: Letch is lonely and just wants to have friends, but his methods of going about it are questionable. He's got no Evil Plan, in reality, just doesn't know how to socialise well.
- Artistic License – Biology: The way the insects are depicted is very cartoony, being nowhere even close to the real thing.
- Bad Boss: Letch, a blue leech, is abusive and mistreats the Buck and Buddy, even if they get a single thing wrong.
- Comic-Book Time: None of the protagonists seem to age at all and it's never made clear how old they are, but given that insects age differently than humans this is justified. How time runs in this universe hasn't been stated explicitly by the creators.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: The first few episodes had Stock Sound Effects although these started to be used less often from Episode 8, "The Puppet Masters" onwards, and colorization was a little different. Also, the pacing was a bit slower and Buck and Buddy's dynamic of best friends were not fully fleshed out.
- Expy: Roger the cockroach is one of Squidward Tentacles. He's got a Jerkass personality, is the resident Butt-Monkey and is irritated by the protagonists, and is their tetchy neighbor, with Born Unlucky as one characteristic, but to differentiate himself from that character, he's not a Jerk with a Heart of Gold and doesn't have the narcissism of Squidward.
- "Flowers for Algernon" Syndrome: Downplayed with Letch the leech; he's still a jerkass, but some of his jerkass traits go as the series slowly moves on.
- G-Rated Drug: Caffeine is treated as this in the episode "Buzz Off!" when a can of coffee rolls onto the shore of the setting Wishy Washy Bay, but this is done for comedy and also to keep it child-friendly too; however, caffeine can be addictive in real life, effectively making this a zig-zagged trope.
- Go-Karting with Bowser: There are times when Letch the leech won't antagonise Buck and Buddy, but it's on very rare occasions, but as time went on, he slowly gets better.
- Good Angel, Bad Angel: Parodied at the end of "The New Letch" as the devil and angel aren't fighting, but dancing with each other inside Letch, at least until Letch turns into a One-Winged Angel as a result of stress he's undergone in the episode from his personality change.
- Gross-Out Show: The setting is a rubbish dump, so it's justified that the setting is disgusting.
- Humans Are Special: To the main characters, anything provided by humans is seen often as being god-like and benevolent, taking "one man's trash is another man's treasure" literally here, human trash is benevolence to the insects. However, we never see any humans in the show.
- I Just Want to Have Friends: Letch the leech really wants to have friends, and has self-loathing.
- Jerkass: Letch the blue leech is mean, egotistical and treats everybody with disdain.
- Mime and Music-Only Cartoon: No actual dialogue, apart from sound effects; all actions are conveyed through slapstick.
- One-Winged Angel: Parodied; when Letch the leech turns into one it looks like an oversized version of him, although Played for Laughs too.
- Odd Friendship: Buck and Buddy have differing attitudes on many things, with Buck being the more reserved, Buddy the over-excited, gung-ho one, but somehow they seem to get on.
- Small, Secluded World: Overlapping with the World Limited to the Plot, the setting is confined to Wishy Washy Bay, but the outside world is rarely seen.
- Sour Outside, Sad Inside: Letch the leech may be a jerkass, but he's lonely and has No Social Skills.
- Trumplica: Letch the leech and the duo's de facto boss may not have the hairdo of Donald Trump, but his behavior mirrors The Donald in every other way possible, and he's as close as you can get to the richest individual there.
- World Limited to the Plot: The setting is Wishy Washy Bay, a beach city on a rubbish dump within a jungle, and it doesn't go beyond it.
