Western Animation / Eek! The Cat

"Kumbaya!"

Eek! The Cat is a American/Canadian animated series, created by Savage Steve Holland and Bill Kopp, produced by Savage Studios Ltd., Nelvana, Fox Kids, and Saban international. that ran from September 12, 1992, to August 8, 1997 on Fox Kids. It was retitled Eek! Stravaganza in 1994.

The series mainly revolves around an optimistic purple housecat named Eek, whose motto is "it never hurts to help". This generally turns out to be untrue, as this attitude generally gets him into trouble, from which much of the humor of the show is derived. Other characters include Eek's human family, who don't understand animal language; Sharky the Sharkdog, who is irritated by Eek's oblivious enthusiasm for everything and chases him at the drop of a hat; and Eek's girlfriend, Annabelle, a rather big cat whom Eek loves and Sharky protects.

The show later added two different segments. The first of these was The Terrible Thunderlizards, which focused on a trio of dinosaurs trying to destroy a pair of oblivious cavemen, Bill and Scooter, while also fighting an evil tribe of skeletal dinosaurs called the Thugasaurs. The second was Klutter, which was about a bunch of neighborhood kids and their living pile of junk and clothing. Klutter was produced by Film Roman, with some of the creative team from The Critic behind it (including David Silverman as the boy's dad), as opposed to Eek! and Thunderlizards, which were produced by Nelvana.

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Eek! The Cat contains examples of:

• Accidental Misnaming: The Mayor keeps getting everyone's name wrong.
• The Ahnold: Doc Tari of The Terrible Thunderlizards, whose vocal style and personality is a clear parody of various Arnold Schwarzenegger characters.
• Aliens Are Bastards: Zoltar.
• All-Loving Hero: No matter how much the universe is out to get him, Eek always remains amiable to everyone he comes across.
• Amazing Technicolor Wildlife: Eek has purple fur, his girlfriend Annabelle has pink fur, and Sharky is gray.
• Amazonian Beauty: Sharky has a passionate, unrequited love for Platinum, a muscular, gorgeous female American Gladiator-type on TV.
• Amusing Injuries: People (especially Eeek, Sharky, Bill, and the Terrible Thunderlizards) are constantly getting hurt, but it's always played for laughs.
• Analogy Backfire: Eek tries to cheer some people up by saying they're like a nearby campfire, but the campfire is going out.
• And Call Him "George": The old lady who mistakes Eek for her own cat mittens in "Misereek".
• And Starring: When the Thunderlizards segments were added the show was billed as Eek! And The Terrible Thunderlizards.
• Angry Guard Dog: Sharky the sharkdog, Eek's nemesis. It's a literal shark/dog hybrid.
• Animated Actors: In one episode, Eek discovers his girlfriend is voiced by a burly, overweight tattooed man, and himself by a little old lady.
• Art Evolution: By the final season, humans were drawn much more realistically (the exceptions being the human characters who were introduced in the earlier seasons).
• Attention Whore: Annabelle had moments of this. Especially in "HawaiiEek 5-0".
• Back That Light Up: It has a color palette dimmed down far more than most SNES games for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. As well as the Amiga game it was dolled up from.
• Bee-Bee Gun: All the firearms on The Terrible Thunderlizards fire swarms of bees that harass the target, but are mostly used for comedic effect.
• Big Bad: Zoltar essentially serves as one for the Eek segments: constantly trying to destroy the Earth (often using Annabelle as a battery), only to be foiled by Eek and crew. However, he was only a recurring threat and wasn't seen much. The Thunderlizards, meanwhile, had the Thugasaur's leader Thugo.
• Big Beautiful Woman: Eek sees Annabelle as this the few times he actually notices her size (the rest of the time, he's genuinely confused when people tell him she's fat).
  Person who has seen Annabelle's photo: She's... FAT.
  Eek (clueless): Really?!
• Big Eater: The reason for Annabelle's weight isn't exactly kept secret, though it doesn't come up more than once an episode, on average.
• Big "SHUT UP!": In "Thundersaurus Wrecks", Bill does this to Scooter as they fall off a cliff while both trapped in tyres.
  Scooter: Okay. Okay. These round things we're in give me an idea.
  Bill: Will this idea make the ground softer when we hit it?
  Scooter: No.
  Bill: Then will you do me a little favor, Scooter?
  Scooter: Sure, Bill.
  Bill: JUST SHUT UP!
• Bilingual Bonus: If the French tape she's listening to in episode 103 is anything to go by - the mom's language lesson tapes have her supposedly learning nonsensical expressions in a given language that have no relation to the even more nonsensical English translation the tape provides for what she just mispronounced (e.g. French - "Much my hat" - English - "the rats have eaten the car")
• Black Bead Eyes: Some human characters, especially JB, are presented with eyes that are nothing more than little black beads.
• Butt-Monkey: The basic humor of the Eek and Terrible Thunder Lizards segments is how the characters Eek (and later Sharky) and Bill are constantly falling afoul of terrible luck, resulting in Amusing Injuries.
• Captain Ersatz: The Squishy Bears are quite obvious parodies of the Care Bears.
• Card-Carrying Villain: Thugo, the leader of the skeletal Thugasaurs, prides himself on being an exemplary villain. He's constantly hatching up evil schemes to destroy the dinosaurs, dresses in a black hood, and does an Evil Laugh every other episode.
• The Cassandra: Piggy the Penguin. Given how he's based off the Lord of the Flies character of the same name, it's definitely appropriate.
• Cast as a Mask: Zoltar (Brad Garret) in two different episodes. The first time, Eek Vs. The Flying Saucers, his disguised voice was provided by Jaid Barrymore (Drew's mom). The second time, Eekscalibur, his disguised voice was provided by Cam Clarke.
• Catchphrase: "It never hurts to help!" and "Kumbaya!"
  • Also, "Oh gosh, it hurts!!" and "Get 'em off! GET 'EM OFF!!"
  • "...Holly, Acorn, Steven Jr, Gunther, and my wife Suuuuusan."
  • From Bill of the "Thunderlizards": "When will the hurting stop..?"
    • Bill also occasionally has "Are you happy now, Scooter? Are you happy now?"
  • "THUNDERLIZARDS RULE!!"
  • "Why is it always me?! Why is it always me?!"
  • Squatt: "Blast 'em all and let the archaeologists sort 'em out!"
  • Kutter, to Squatt when asked if something bad is about to happen to them: "This would fit NICELY in the BAD THINGS CATEGORY!"
• Cats Are Mean: If this site had such a thing as a Most Triumphant Aversion, Eek would be it for this trope. He is extremely kind to everyone, even those who are actively trying to mangle him.
• Cats Have Nine Lives: In at least one episode Eek is shown to have a tally card for his nine lives.
• Character Development: Sharky. In Season 1, he's your standard mean dog. Starting in Season 2, the writers slowly give him more depth until he becomes one of the most sympathetic and interesting characters in the series. He keeps his mean-streak, but he eventually gets to the point where he pretty much won't show it unless provoked.
• Chick Magnet:
  • For some reason, Eek constantly has a plethora of gorgeous babes making it known that they want him. Eek however always makes sure to tell them that he already has a girlfriend, which is sweet in his devotion but disturbing for the girls who can't believe he'd prefer someone like Annabelle over them. One tries to kill her, since if she can't have Eek, no one will.
  • Pierre seems more popular with the little girls than the other Squishy Bears, maybe because Everything Sounds Sexier in French.
• Christmas Episode:
  • "It's a Wonderful Nine Lives" (Season 1): Eek tries to travel to distant city, in order to deliver an orphan's Christmas present. Narrated by Tim Curry in rhyming fashion.
  • "It's a Very Merry Eek's Mas" (Season 2): Sharky is depressed over being separated from his family, but just as Eek seeks out Santa, it turns out that the reindeer have gone on strike, the elves haven't finished the toys, and Santa has a broken leg. Eek and Sharky team up with Elmo to both save Christmas and find the sharkdog family.
• Clingy Jealous Girl: Annabelle doesn't take kindly to other girls trying to steal her boyfriend.
• The Comically Serious: Bill the Caveman in the Terrible Thunderlizards shorts.
• Cowardly Lion: Eek. This trope must be the reason for his name.
  • Brave Elmo the Elk, who's anything but brave.
• Crossover: The end of "Eek Space 9" had Mulder and Scully from The X-Files (also a Fox series) showing up having witness a flying saucer plough right into their FBI building, which makes Scully "believe". For added hilarity, David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson voice themselves.
• A Day in the Limelight: One of the very last episodes focused entirely on Sharky. Eek had almost no speaking parts.
• Deadpan Snarker: Bill's main way of dealing with his crappy life is to dryly snark about Scooter's stupidity, his terrible record at inventing anything useful, and... well, pretty much all the things that make his life suck.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: Sasha from season one. In her first scene, she proudly proclaims that she has a heart of ice and proceeds to pop some poor kid's balloon. When she meets Eek, his kindness (and apparent sex appeal) manage to melt that so-called icy heart.
• Dem Bones: The Thugasaurs are (un)living skeletal dinosaurs.
• Depending on the Writer: Multiple examples
  • Most of the time, Eek is the only one who finds Annabelle attractive, but other times the world treats her as if she's a radiant beauty.
  • In Terrible Thunder Lizards, Doc is usually nominally competent and Squatt is The Millstone, but Cutter may be either of the two.
• The Door Slams You: In "Bearz in the Hood", Eek gets squashed by the security guard opening the door on him.
• Dumb Dinos: The Thunderlizards, especially Squatt, aren't too bright.
• Dynamite Candle: Eek's owners keep dynamite next to their candles and it almost causes an explosion during a blackout. Fortunately, the lights come back when the mother is about to light a stick of dynamite. She remains oblivious to what she was about to do.
• Elvis Has Left the Planet: One episode involving alien abduction featured a brief shot of Elvis amongst the specimens. Another one speculates that he had a shrink-ray-related accident some years ago.
  • The latter involving him having Easy Amnesia, regaining his memory and then getting abducted by aliens.
  • Also, a slightly more subtle gag from the Halloween Episode, when Eek befriends a group of ghosts. At the end when the ghosts are leaving to return to the spirit world, Eek bids them goodbye and asks, "Say 'Hi' to Elvis for me." Cue all of the ghosts muttering in confusion as none of them have ever met or heard of Elvis.
• Enemy Mine: Occasionally Eek and Sharky have worked together for one reason or another.
  • One episode of the Thunderlizards revealed why they were in jail before being tapped as expendable agents to wipe out humanity: during a mission, they were stranded in hostile terrain and ended up working with a Thugasaur to survive and escape. Though they succeeded, General Galapagos spotted them with the Thugasaur and had them arrested, falsely accused of treason, and thrown into prison until the series proper began.
    • Bill and Scooter will occasionally help out the Thunderlizards when they aren't being hunted down by them, such as the time they helped to save the President's daughter.
• Epunymous Title:
  • Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Most of the episode titles are parodies of famous movie titles with the Eek's name somehow worked into them.
    • Oddly, the episode titles sometimes have NOTHING to do with the episode itself. Despite being named after Mystic Pizza, MystEek Pizza has nothing in common with the movie (indeed, even the pizza that kicks the plot off loses relevance after the first five minutes).
• Exposed Animal Bellybutton
• Expy: Eek looks ridiculously similar to Garfield, as some would say. The main difference between him and the pasta-loving cat is Eek is far kinder and more idealistic — and solid purple, rather than tiger-stripped orange.
  • Given that the three Terrible Thunderlizards are already a group of falsely accused special forces, it's not hard to guess who Mr. T Rex is supposed to be, even before he starts dropping the word 'Fool' twice per sentence.
  • Alice from Fatal Eektraction is a furry version of Glenn Close's character Alex from Fatal Attraction. Complete with her sole episode referencing scenes from the movie (like Alex's iconic line "I'm not going to be IGNORED, Dan!" and her killing then boiling a girl's pet rabbit).
• Evil Lawyer Joke: The Musical Episode ends with the villains releasing the lawyers, who only back down when they meet Sharky, who's "just as awful as them".
• Evil Stole My Faith: A Christmas Episode features a gift destined for an orphan falling from Santa's sleigh and Eek has an Imagine Spot where said orphan, as a result of not receiving said present, starts doubting there's a savior.
• Eyeless Face: The old lady who inadvertently takes in Eek in "Misereek".
• Freudian Excuse: Sharky attempts to give one as to why he's suck a jerk in "Shark Doggy Dog."
• Furry Confusion: Eek is a pet cat, and lives with a human family. Anabelle however has her own house and her own pet dog. The two witch cats wear clothes and have their own castle.
• Furry Ear Dissonance: Eek has ears that are shaped like golf clubs.
• Gag Series: The show is not played even remotely serious.
• The Ghost: Annabelle's owner is only heard in her debut episode after she's unloaded from her cat carrier saying "Welcome to your new home, Annabelle". The owner afterwards is rarely, if ever mentioned, leaving some to believe that she's an intelligent animal that owns her own home. At the very least, a later episode confirms that she is Sharky's actual owner, so it's very possible that she was retconned into one.
• Gonk: Eek's human family, as well as some other humans who show up in the series, are presented as quite ugly-looking.
• Grand Finale: "The Island of Dr. Meow". Has almost every regular character in it. Eek is implied to have married Annabelle and become President (Annabelle is the First Lady). Subverted due to 1. the episode being about Sharky, not Eek (who barely appears in it at all), and 2. It not being the actual final episode. Seriously though, this would have been the logical place to end it.
  • An earlier episode from the same season, "MystEEK Pizza", had a good number of appearances by the various mauve shirts of the series (including Zoltar and Elvis) and was sort of a final curtain call for them.
• Halloween Episode: "HallowEek" from Season 1. Eek helps J.B. and Wendy Elizabeth with their trick-or-treating, only to get separated and end up in a graveyard. He then meets a ghost named Cryptie that's been separated from his own family, so they agree to work together to find their loved ones, only to learn a Hot Witch has nefarious plans for all of them.
• Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: Scooter is a perfectly nice, friendly guy, even if he does unintentionally cause harm to those around him (notably Bill). On the other hand, Alice from Fatal Eektraction is a murderous lady who wants to take Eek for herself. Being an expy of Alex from Fatal Attraction that's no surprise.
• Hartman Hips: Andrea Heap from Klutter has a visual design that includes exaggerated hips.
  • Pam and Polly, a pair of feline witches from episode "Quadrapedia" sport matching, curvy figures.
• Hello, [Insert Name Here]: "Natural Bored Kittens" opens with Eek trying out a VR headset. Every time the game addresses him, it abruptly cuts to a different voice saying "EEK THE CAT".
• Hidden Depths: Sharky after the writers moved him beyond just being the mean dog.
• Hot Librarian: From Klutter: Andrea Heap, hot library employee. (Plus, voiced by Kathy Ireland.)
• Hot Witch: The unnamed antagonist of the Halloween Episode "HallowEek". She even invokes Screw the Rules, I'm Beautiful! at one point.
• Hypocritical Heartwarming: In "Thundersaurus Wrecks", when Scooter is crushed by a baby bat, Bill thinks it's attacking him, and rushes to save him, the only reason being that he can destroy Scooter later.
• Identical Twin ID Tag: Pam and Polly from episode "Quadrapedia" look almost identical except for different hair color and outfit choice (Pam sports black hair and red leotard with gloves and heeled boots, while Polly has brown hair and black dress with matching heeled shoes). This may have caused some trouble for the animators because in some scenes, Polly's animation cels briefly get swapped by Pam's (but still maintaining Polly's colors) between frames.
• I'm a Humanitarian: Technical example: Annabelle is made the queen of some bizarre-looking savages on an island out in the middle of nowhere. Problem was that, "In order for the queen to become a goddess, she must be cooked and then eaten by the king." Cue shot of the king drooling in anticipation as he slavers, "I like girls."
• Impossible Hourglass Figure: Alice from "Fatal Eektraction" has an exaggeratedly drastic waist-to-hips & shoulders ratio.
• Incredible Shrinking Man: Bill gets shrunk at the end of "The Yawn of Man".
• Instrumental Theme Tune: Eek! The Cat (the only word in the tune is "Eek!"), as well as Klutter.
• Interspecies Romance: Besides the number of human and extraterrestrial women (plus one giant female insect) who have thrown themselves at Eek, Sharky is implied to have a crush on Annabelle in one episode. Plus, there's Sharky's long-standing crush on the human woman, Platinum, from his favorite show, Patriotic Warriors.
• Inventional Wisdom: Why in the nine hells would a rocket built to go to Jupiter have a switch that allows one to set the course for either Jupiter or the Sun?
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Sharky really isn't such a bad guy...
• Killer Rabbit: Eek's family finds a cute little bunny on their doorstep and adopt it. Little do they know that it plans to murder them all once Eek's out of the way...
  • Sharky The Shark Dog also qualifies, being rather small and cute for an Angry Guard Dog.
• Large Ham:
  • Annabelle. Whenever she is extremely happy, she cries out "Let heaven and nature sing!"
  • JB, Bill, and any other character voiced by Charlie Adler.
• Leitmotif: Eek, Annabelle, and Sharky each have one, and each leitmotif was given variations based on whatever genre a particular episode was spoofing.
  • Everyone in the Terrible Thunderlizards segments. The Thunderlizards get a sort of rock leitmotif, the cavemen get a happy little jazz piano theme, and Babs gets her own romantic Casio theme.
  • Klutter had his own as well, based on his reggae-style theme.
• Lightning Can Do Anything: Kinda-sorta example: Static electricity is what somehow brought Klutter to life.
• Littlest Cancer Patient: Parodied with Elmo's little brother Timmy. As the seasons go by, these conditions that Timmy needs to get treated for get progressively sillier. At one point Elmo is trying to fund the therapy Timmy needs to recover from the psychologically traumatic experience of seeing Rush Limbaugh's butt.
• Living Clothes: Klutter, a living pile of clothes and mess that featured in its own segment during the last season of the show.
• Logo Joke: In "The Great Eekscape", Nelvana's polar bear logo makes a cameo on the prison's wall. And in "Eek's Sneek Peek", the Fox Kids logo is shown as the HQ for that network, while outside Nelvana's frost-covered studios, a polar bear is seen roaring similarly to their logo — the bear then tries to eat the moose animators.
• Lovable Coward: Eek. He's not especially brave, tending to scream and panic when confronted by danger, but he always overcomes his cowardice in a pinch and he's such a nice guy otherwise that you never dislike him.
• Love Triangle:
  • In Eek's show, there are hints that Sharky is also in love with Annabelle, who is in a mutual love with Eek.
  • In The Terrible Thunderlizards, Scooter initially likes Babs, who likes Bill, who initially likes Babs but then abandons her when she turns out to be domineering and abusive.
• Luke Nounverber: Leek Bottomsitter.
• Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy: Babs and Bill have this dynamic. Bill is a submissive, emotional, paranoid and vulnerable man, whilst Babs is much more aggressively assertive, dominant, and take-charge. In a rare spin on the trope, Babs being so much more masculine than Bill — or at least expressing that in an abusive way — drives Bill away from her.
• Mega Neko: Annabelle, mainly due to her weight.
• Mind Screw: The ending of "Fatal Eektraction," in which The Reveal is that Alice is actually Sharkella, Sharky's long lost twin sister... only for the trio to walk out of the movie commenting on the predictable plot twist, and Alice reveals that she's actually Sharky's twin brother, before revealing it's a joke.
• Minion with an F in Evil: Biff is the second-in-command of the Thugasaurs, and clearly not cut out for villainy. He'd much rather be picking flowers and hanging out with his comrades than participating in the various evil plans of his boss Thugo.
• Missing Steps Plan: In "The Island of Dr. Meow", one of the titular Doctor's underlings questions how exactly he's gonna Take Over the World with his Mix-and-Match Critters plan (by gene-splicing monkeys and various fruit and veggies together); Dr. Meow kicks his butt in retribution.
• Morality Pet: Annabelle is this to Sharky; he can always be counted on to do the right thing (as opposed to being a vicious jerk) for Annabelle's sake.
• The Moving Experience: In the pilot, Eek finds out, to his dismay, that his new girlfriend is moving again. After being sad for a short time, he turns the letter over to read "P.S. I'm moving across the street."
• Musical Episode: "Quadrapedia", which features a variety of styles ranging from hair metal to operatic - fitting, given Annabelle's stature.
• Ms. Fanservice: Various attractive girls have popped up throughout the series.
• Nervous Wreck: Eek and Mittens are both extremely nervous and paranoid, due to their enormous bad luck.
• Nice Guy: Eek, who's motto is "It never hurts to help!", even when it does.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Every. Single. Time that Eek tries to do something nice for somebody, then somebody is going to get hurt. With about a 60-40 ratio of it being Eek or the person he's trying to help... unless it's Sharky, then it tends to be 50/50, or at least Sharky gets hurt by Eek, then Sharky hurts Eek for it.
• No One Gets Left Behind: In a "Thunderlizards" segment, the titular dinosaurs grudgingly remembered this rule when an obnoxious parody/cameo of Mr. T got dragged away by a carnivorous plant. Then one asked, "We don't have to go too fast, do we?," and they smiled and moseyed.
  • Subverted in an episode where Eek, Annabelle and two ape astronauts escape from aliens and land safely on Earth. Eek's the only one that got stuck on the moon, hoping someone will come for him, saying "People won't leave me all alone in the cold darkness of space. Would they?".
• "Oh, Crap!" Smile: Bill does this in "Thundersaurus Wrecks" when he sees a giant mother bat looming over him.
• Odd Name Out: Hey kids! Get ready for those swell Squishy Bearz: Puffy, Cozy, Wuz Wuz, and...Pierre!
• Once per Episode: 1) Eek will proclaim that it never hurts to help. 2) It will then hurt. A lot.
• Only Sane Man:
  • Sharky, for the most part, is this; Annabelle is a lazy, overdramatic glutton, whilst Eek is naive to the point of stupidity and constantly causing accidents.
  • Pierre is this in the Show Within a Show, The Squishy Bears Rainbow of Enchantment Fun Minute, where his role is usually to try and call the other Squishy Bears out on their stupidity.
  • Vanna from "Klutter" is the most sensible and down to earth member of the group.
• Papa Wolf: Sharky is normally an Angry Guard Dog in general, but he gets REALLY mad if Annabelle is threatened.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: In one episode, celebrities the Squishy Bearz are framed for robbery by rats wearing these.
• Parental Bonus: Frequent:
  • The parody of Apocalypse Now.
  • One episode had Eek walking along singing the Talking Heads' "Life During Wartime".
  • Another was an abridged parody of The Terminator.
  • Another was a parody of Cape Fear.
  • The Graduate, A Clockwork Orange, Fatal Attraction, and Pulp Fiction each got a parody episode, too.
  • "Way to go, Sharky! You've brightened up the dull city of Mctropolis with the light of a thousand suns!""
  • Eek's namecheck of the Barbi Twins in his speech to Zoltar (see Shout-Out).
  • One episode had Eek underwater, where he befriended a squid who sounded like Rain Man ("Yeah. Home good. Definitely yeah.").
• Parody Episode: Besides its usual plots, the show had several episodes like this, including a parody of Apocalypse Now, Star Trek, Jaws, and The Exorcist.
• Patrick Stewart Speech: Eek really, really, really loves planet Earth in general.
• Phrase Catcher: Every time Eek shows someone a picture of Annabelle.
  A person: She's really... fat.
  Eek: [genuinely puzzled] Really?
  • Piggy the penguin is also this. "Shut up, Piggy!"
• The Pollyanna: Eek himself, despite his perpetual Butt-Monkey status.
  • Scooter as well, though he isn't nearly as unlucky — mostly because Bill tends to be the bad luck magnet.
• Poorly Disguised Pilot: Subverted to a degree, both the Thunderlizards and Klutter did get to be their own shows briefly before being reincorporated into Eek!Stravangaza (and for a few episodes at the end of the fourth season, replaced Eek! entirely in the show)
• Prison Episode: "The Great Eekscape".
• Rerouted from Heaven: An episode has Eek dying and winding up in the Celestial Bureaucracy. This shouldn't have happened in the first place, because Eek hadn't used up all nine of his lives yet. Then, a damned soul asks Eek to hold his rap sheet while he "goes to the bathroom", so Eek winds up getting sent to Hell in his place. However, Eek is so optimistic that the torments of Hell don't affect him at all, and he succeeds at all the Sisyphean tasks the Devil sets for him.
• Rule of Three: In "Eek vs. the Flying Saucers":
  Mother: (to whining child) Stop it, stop it, STOP IT!
• Running Gag:
  Random character: Your girlfriend's... fat.
  Eek: (looks at her photo, confused) Really?
  • Eek accidentally destroying Sharky's doghouse.
  • Eek's owner absently destroying the house by cleaning it while listening to her foreign language tapes
  • Elmo's little brother Timmy needing operations done for his long string of ridiculous ailments.
  • The continued efforts of scientists Hank and Jib to calibrate the Hubble telescope, only for Eek or something else to hit and ruin it.
• Screams Like a Little Girl: Bill the Caveman, thanks to Charlie Adler's amazing vocal range.
• Shout-Out:
  • Eek usually receives a character's compliment and then talks by mentioning random names and titles non-stop, i.e. in the episode "Eek vs. the Flying Saucers", when he meets Zoltar at the alien starship, looking pretty sad:
    Eek: Why Zoltar, why would you want to destroy such a great planet as Earth? A planet full of wonderful things. I mean we've got rivers and fields and children and Dr. Seuss and Woody Allen and Mr. Rogers and Monet, the Muppets, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Shakespeare, Louis Armstrong, the Barbi Twins and...
  • In an episode of Thunderlizards, an astronaut from the present crash landed, thinking he's on an alien planet. Then he believes he's in the Far Future when he saw the ruined Statue of Liberty with Eek's head.
  • "Run, forest! Run!" (To a literal forest of trees.)
  • One to The Godfather of all things in the episode "Halloweek" when Eek accidentally causes a trick-or-treater wearing a horse's head to crash into a mobster's bed.
  • Eek, with a small squid on his head, boards a train and enters a berth where The Beatles see him.
    John: Who's that?
    Paul: Oh, that's me grandfather.
    George: That's not yer grandfather. It's a cat with a squid on 'is 'ead!
• Simpleton Voice: Wuz Wuz, the dumbest of the Squishy Bears, is given the stereotypical "moron voice" to emphasize his lack of intelligence.
• Sliding Scale of Anthropomorphism: Eek is a Civilized Animal, though he acts more like a typical cat only when he's with his owner.
• The So-Called Coward: Elmo the elk has a reputation for cowardice, but always shows a badass side when he needs to be.
• Southern Belle: Annabelle. She even gets a Gorgeous Period Dress at the end of her debut episode.
• Take That!: Took a few jabs at Rush Limbaugh over the years, but, with one exception in the final season, not over his politics.
• The Smurfette Principle: Parodied in the Terrible Thunder Lizards; the only female human seen in the series is Babs, who is artificially created by splicing together X-chromosomes harvested from Bill and Scooter. The result is then sent to destroy the two humans. Whilst she abandons that plan, it's to take over the world in the name of "womankind" — also, whilst she's technically smarter than either of the men (having Scooter's inventive intellect with Bill's common sense), she's also a Jerkass, being arrogant, manipulative, and domineering. Though she favors Bill, she also treats him like a slave and forces him to do all manual labor for her plans and inventions; he promptly abandons her to resume his life with Scooter, judging his oblivious stupidity to be the lesser of two evils.
• Those Two Guys: Piggy the Penguin and his nameless companion.
• Through a Face Full of Fur: In "Misereek", when the old lady puts Eek in a stove and accidentally almost cooks him, Eek turns red all over.
• Time for Plan B: Four criminals stole a statue while disguised as the Squishy Bearz but had no plan for what to do after that. Since they had no Plan B and couldn't come up with any, they decided to do Plan A backwards: take the statue back with the statue being disguised.
• Tiny Guy, Huge Girl: Eek and Annabelle; thanks in part to Annabelle's morbid obesity, Eek is barely a third of her size.
• Throw the Dog a Bone: Despite all the crap he deals with, Eek usually ends up somewhat happy.
  • In "Misereek", after wandering around starving and suffering from a short-sighted, Mr. Magoo-like old lady who treats him rougher than she realizes, Eek comes home to his real family who finally feed him.
• Too Dumb to Live: The reason the Thunderlizards were sent to wipe out humanity was because mankind is so stupid they were a threat to all other life. In the final "Thunderlizards" episode, they mistake a freeze ray that was developed by the Dinosaur military that the Thunderlizards misplaced for a camera and accidentally caused the ice age that wiped out the Dinosaurs while trying to take a picture with it.
• Too Spicy for Yog-Sothoth: In an episode where he dies and goes to hell (don't worry, he gets better), Eek is just too damn cheery for eternal torment to phaze him.
• Totally Radical: Bo Diddly Squatt might as well be some sort of misplaced Ninja Turtle.
• Trademark Favorite Food: The giants slugs apparently like to have Bill in their mouths. At one point, there's even a class of this.
• Trading Bars for Stripes: The Thunderlizards' backstory is that they used to be in the army, but they were imprisoned after being falsely accused of treason. The Thunderlizards had been working with an enemy Thugasaur to survive behind enemy lines. They were accused of treason and were incarcerated until the start of the series.
• Two Shorts: Starting with the second season. The first season only had half-hour episodes.
• The Unintelligible: Sharky, as he only "talks" using dog noises. Sometimes, his "dialogue" is translated into English subtitles, just for humorous purposes.
• Vacation Episode: One "Thunderlizards" segment is about Bill and Scooter actually inventing the concept of a vacation.
• Verbal Tic: Scooter says "okay" A LOT. He says "Huh?" just as much.
  • Same with Eek and "gee".
  Eek: Gee, I sure say "gee" a lot.
  • Mittens always says "man".
• Whole Episode Flashback: "The Whining Pirates of Tortuga", about a younger Eek's life with pirates.
• Whole-Plot Reference: "Fatal Eektraction" to the almost identical film name.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Eek is really afraid of bugs.
• Wild Take: Everybody in this show performs exaggerated facial expressions when shocked, startled or horrified.
• Yandere: Alice from the fittingly named, Fatal Eektraction.

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EEK!

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