Please note that there are two significantly different dubs of this program from the original French. In this article, names and references to the more faithful US dub are before the / and the UK dub after it.
Insektors is a 1994 French CGI animated TV series (actually the first TV series to be fully CGI) about a conflict between two different tribes of anthropomorphic insects. The tribes are the Joyces/Verigreens, who are brightly coloured and airborne, and the Yuks/Kruds, who are fixated on keeping their furnaces burning to survive. It was made by a small French studio called Fantome, and it received the 1994 of the "Children and Young People" Emmy award.
There are two different English-language dubs; an American one and a British one. The American dub is far more faithful to the original scripts, but has been criticized for treating its audience like morons unable to understand subtle dialogue. The UK dub, on the other hand, changed some names, dialogue, and characterization to make a more comedic tone. A good example of the stylistic difference is that in the French and American version the frog mechs are called "Koa the Frog" or "Koas", while in the British dub that is translated to "Stereoscopic Hydraulic Amphibious Personnel Relocation Units" or for short, "Frogbuckets".
Although the two sides are at war, all the weapons are non-lethal. The Joyces/Verigreens fire globs of colour (made from flower pollen) to make their enemies laugh and dance, while the Yuk/Krud weapons fire darker globs that the American dub identifies as "coal juice", which inflict a state of deep misery and apathy on those hit by them. Either way, combatants are taken out of action until restored at their base.
A recurring theme is that the Yuk/Krud way of life is ultimately futile, as they get their fuel from chopping down flowers (they are the size of trees relative to the cast), which will eventually run out due to the voracious way that the Yuks/Kruds insist on burning through them. The Joyces/Verigreens try to educate them against this foolishness, but the Yuks/Kruds will not be easily swayed, especially when Queen Bakrakra/Catheter III demands ever-raging fires to try and counteract her own eternal chill.
While more or less the same tropes are used in each adaptation, their execution differs regularly.
Insektors provide example of the following tropes:
- Accent Adaptation: Mostly for regions of America/The UK. More noticeable and varied in the UK dub. They made Lukanus Japanese.
- Adaptational Name Change: The UK dub changes the names for everyone and everything.
- Amazon Brigade: The Dragonflys, who act as colour bombers (and apparently the entire Joyce/Verigreen army).
- Ambiguous Robots: Spotty/Elmo and the Dragonflies. In Elektric Night/Klose Enkounters Teknocratus/Synapse refers to Spotty/Elmo as a "natural source of light" while treating them like a robot to be dismantled (though this could just be callousness). The Dragonflies are called mechanical in supplementary materials and speak with robotic voices, but are affected by the disease in It's Katching/Kontagion whereas Gallipus/Peg and the Yuk/Krud aircraft are not.
- Bad Is Good and Good Is Bad: The US Dub gives this trait to the Yuks, with Kretinus in particular prone to waxing poetically on how drab and depressing things are. The very second episode has Queen Bakrakra waxing happily over an abysmally tuneless rendition of "Happy Birthday" (here "Sinister Birthday") accompanied by inept percussion music and being delighted with Krabo's ugly statue of her.
- Deadpan Snarker: Teknocratus in the US dub, the royal herald (and much more so) in the UK dub.
- Disappeared Dad: Acylius/Maximillian's father is never so much as mentioned.
- Enemy Mine: One dual-parter episode involved the two sides teaming up to destroy an asteroid that would cause The End of the World as We Know It.
- Evil Is Deathly Cold: Played with; Bakrakra/Catheter III is always freezing cold... but unlike most examples of this trope, she hates the cold and is constantly trying to warm herself up, to the point her personal chambers are depicted with flickering flames like the interior of a furnace. Her demand to be kept warm and toasty fuels the Yuk/Krud war against the Joyces/Verigreens, as they rapaciously clearcut flowers to fuel her heating system. It's left unclear if the cold is due to living in the icy and dreary surroundings of the swamp, or if it's a physical manifestation of her own heartless nature.
- Evil Is Petty: Overlapping with Silly Reason for War; the entire Yuk/Voyce (or Krud/Verigreen) conflict is because their Queen hates being cold and is determined to stay warm, even if this means rampantly deforesting the flower forests to satiate that petty desire.
- Evil Prince: Inverted in Acylius/Maximillian, who is a Yuk/Krud who despises the Yuk/Krud lifestyle and only becomes more obsessed with escaping them to live amongst the Joyces/Verigreens after actually meeting them.
- Faceless Goons: Both sides, probably as a time and cost saving measure. Unless you have a name you are a small beetle if a Yuk/Krud and a bee is a Joyce/Verigreen.
- Flight: The Joyces/Verigreens are capable of flight with their own wings, though they still use Gallipus/Peg for longer trips. It's pointed out on several occasions that Yuks/Kruds cannot fly, with the exception of Prince Acylius/Max who is the only one to even have visible wings. Krabo/Draffsack claims in one episode they don't have wings, though its not brought up why Acylius/Max does. Notably, the early test animations show Kretinus/Fugg flying and Krabo/Draffsack spreading wings of his own.
- Gender Flip: The male Gallopus becomes the female Peg in the UK version.
- Greek Chorus: The Guards/Methane Brothers.
- Green Aesop: Good guys spend their time cultivating flowers, playing music (which aside from General Lukanus/Wasabi's terrible percussion the bad guys hate) and enjoying life. Bad guys spend their time logging forests and being depressed. Due to the overall plot and believability of how the Yuks/Kruds adopted this stance, however —they were a race whose entire culture was built around mining coal, and when that was exhausted, turned to the next source of combustible fuel — it avoids being
Anvilicious. - Happily Adopted: Fulgor/Flynn, although he knows he's adopted, is never shown as anything other than loving to his adoptive family.
- Humongous Mecha: The Yuk/Kruds use a number of these through the series, including a massive beetle-like airship that trails huge cutting blades to mow through flower forests, and the iconic Koa the Frog/Sterioscopic Hydraulic Amphibious Personal Relocation Unit (a.k.a. "Frogbucket"), a two-pilot frog-shaped vehicle that bounds around on its two legs and uses iron jaws to bite through flowers and foes.
- Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: The Yuks/Kruds, also Fulgor/Flynn in some episodes.
- It's All About Me: Literally the entire reason why the two races are at war is because Queen Bakrakra/Catheter III hates the cold and would rather clearcut the Joyce/Verigreen homelands for furnace fuel than either live with the cold or, y'know, move out of the frigid swamp.
- Missing Mom: Aelia/Alex's mother is never even mentioned. Nor is Fulgor/Flynn's biological mother.
- Mordor: The Yuk/Krub hive; a massive, rotting tree stump filled with shadows and gloom, sitting in the middle of a cold, dark, bramble-choked swamp.
- Mundane Utility: The Joyce/Verigreen hero's weapon is a guitar that shoots colour, meaning that, when played, it provides its own fireworks. Most of the big Yuk/Krud weapons were in fact designed as logging equipment.
- The Napoleon: Lord Krabo.
- Post Modern Magick: Fulgor/Flynn's father is as much a sorcerer (referred to as a mystic in the UK dub) as he is a scientist and that is why he can create wonders like Gallopus/Peg. He's also a mechanic who is able to shoot lightning from his fingertips, as Fulgor gets a rather painful demonstration in the final episode.
- The Reveal: Several, over the course of the series:
- Yuks and Joyces are the same people; Joyces are descended from Yuks who touched an alien artifact and chose to renounce the lifeless, dreary existence of perpetually digging for coal to instead devote themselves to life amongst nature, filling their existence with music and color.
- Fulgore/Flynn isn't a Joyce but a Yuk who was reared by Joyces after being left amongst them as a baby in Gallopus'/Peg's compartment.
- Fulgore's father is the previous Chief Engineer of the Yuks, Eurekas, and he's still alive; he's merely been trapped deep underground in a cave complex since a failed attempt to defect from the Yuks.
- Stupid Evil/Too Dumb to Live: In the above-mentioned Enemy Mine episode, Lord Krabo sabotages the asteroid-busting energy-blaster so it is instead locked onto the Flower City, in hopes of ending the war in favor of the Yuks once and for all. Completely ignoring that if the asteroid isn't blown up, they'll be dead.
- Technobabble: Teknocratus does a bit of this but for Synapse it is his primary mode of communication (See Humongous Mecha).
