Pickle and Peanut is a cartoon by Noah Z. Jones (Fish Hooks, Almost Naked Animals) and Joel Trussell airing on Disney XD.
It's pretty much what it says: a comedy about two teenaged best friends that just so happen to be anthropomorphic food items. On one hand, you’ve got Peanut (Johnny Pemberton), a bold dreamer and schemer who, for better and worse, puts his hyperactive energy into almost everything he does. On the other, there’s Pickle (Jon Heder), a soft-spoken, sentimental fellow that typically takes it slow on his own, but is usually game for joining Peanut’s escapades (and vice versa).
Each episode revolves around the odd couple’s strange misadventures, be it at their grocery store job, bumming around the neighborhood or out on the road. Between Pickle’s kindhearted, uncomplicated nature and Peanut’s riotous ambitions, the two often get themselves into unusual situations from things as simple as learning to swim or trying to fit in with the cool kids.
The show started in September 2015, with its first season airing until the following July. After airing its Halloween special in October 2016, the show went on hiatus until the second season premiered a year later.
The show ended its second and final season
on January 20, 2018.
Bo! Bo bo bo! Pickle and Peanut provides examples of these tropes:
- Acid-Trip Dimension: The part of "Cookie Racket" when the Sugar Bees eat Pickle's attempt at one of their cookie recipes and the Running Gag of characters imagining themselves riding a white stallion goes horribly (and hilariously) wrong.
- Affectionate Parody: The Show Within a Show "90's Adventure Bear" is, as its name implies, a parody of Funny Animal shows that were popular in the 90's, namely Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers and TaleSpin (the show also takes inspiration from Birdman (1967)). Many of the hallmarks are there, too; the opening intro, the vibrant logo, the Five-Man Band, the lead character having a Catchphrase, and the Big Bad thinking up outlandish schemes every episode.
- Hell, 90's Adventure Bear is pretty much EVERYTHING we and the writers of this show liked about The Disney Afternoon combined into one!
- Ambiguous Syntax: Bike Jumper isn't a person who jumps things on a bike. He jumps over bikes.
- Ambiguously Bi: Pickle and Peanut always like attention from women. However there are many hints the two see each other as more than just friends.
- Ambiguously Gay: Mr. Mjart.
- Anthropomorphic Objects: Well...yeah, they're the main characters: A walking pickle and peanut.
- Art Shift: The short "Yellow Snow" is done in primitive 3D.
- Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: In "Greg", the boys spray Lazer with a mixture of the zit cream that created Greg and Spoonicorn cereal, causing Greg to grow to enormous size.
- Bait-and-Switch: In "Camp", Pickle, Peanut, and McSweats are attacked by ants while canoeing and doing archery. When they're doing arts and crafts, the camera zooms out to show a crate labeled "live ants", but instead of the ants breaking out of the crate, a moose breaks through the wall and attacks them.
- Benevolent Boss: Mr. Mjart.
- Big Ol' Unibrow: One of the Sugar Bees in "Cookie Racket" is a Type I.
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: Pickle does it during the rap session at the end of the first episode.Pickle: Pickle and Peanut...next episode is better...
- Charlie and the Chocolate Parody: The plot of "Candy Factory", where Peanut finds the winning ticket in a candy bar while clearing out inventory. However, the ticket was from 2004, and the factory has long since closed down.
- Class Reunion: The episode "Preschool Reunion".
- Cloud Cuckooland: The whole show seems to take place in one.
- Clingy Jealous Girl: Gory Agnes to Pickle, after they become a couple.
- Creepy Child: Wayne, a pale-skinned boy who creeps everyone out with his staring.
- Description Cut: In "Bee Colony", when Pickle considers calling Spedacular Donkey to look after his bees and says that he's reliable, it cuts to Spedacular pressing a button during a space shuttle launch that causes it to explode.
- Drives Like Crazy: Peanut. He also has rather creative parking methods when he pulls up to their house as part of a running gag.
- Droste Image: One of Pickle with a zoom on his swim cap in "Sync or Swim".
- "Everybody Laughs" Ending: The end of "Luxury Car Service".
- Evil Old Folks: Mam-Mams, the old lady cyclops in "Gramma Jail" and "Gym Rats".
- Exotic Entree: In "Mobile Aquarium", D-Stixx mentions that he eats endangered animals. Near the end, he tells his chef to prepare a marmoset, which then attacks the chef.
- Expy:
- Eye Scream:
- One of Peanut's schemes, when he's pretending to be 90's Adventure Bear's Arch-Enemy Major Manslaughter, is to assemble a crew of "all-male sky pirates" driving shopping carts in the Mjart Mart parking lot. 90's puts the carts together and pushes them into the cart return, slamming Peanut's eyes against the railing.
- In "The Drone", Wayne commands the boys' cat drone to fire its Eye Beams into Pickle's eyes.
- Formula-Breaking Episode: As a show that goes out of its way to break from the norm, it's only natural that a few episodes are even more out there than the show's usual modus operandi.
- Both of the holiday specials feature short segments done in highly simplistic CGI, with both excluding dialogue entirely in favor of visual gags.
- Two episodes in the second season are Defictionalizations of 90's Adventure Bear's eponymous show. Like 90's himself, both are half-parody/half-homages to the adventure cartoons in The Disney Afternoon (particularly TaleSpin and Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers).
- The Grand Finale, "Clip Show", is a spoof of charity telethons and clip shows, while itself also being a clip show (that sees the characters as fictional actors that also happen to be best friends named Pickle and Peanut).
- Funny Background Event: In "The Goose's Juice", there's two consecutive ones: when Pickle is at work exhausted, he sets the freezer containing several dozen eggs to incubate them. The eggs then hatch and overwhelm Mr. Mjart.
- Garrulous Growth: In "Greg", Pickle gets a sentient pimple named Greg on his butt. Pickle and Peanut decide to give him to Lazer.
- Girl Scouts Are Evil: In "Cookie Racket", the boys start giving out free cookies, and the Sugar Bee scouts don't take kindly to them doing so on their turf. The reason the scouts can't successfully replicate the taste of Pickle's grandmother's cookie recipe is that they were baking their cookies with hate instead of love.
- Gross-Up Close-Up: On occasions such as in "Greg" where we see puppet animated mouths eating some cereal, or "Gramma Jail" where we're suddenly shown a very disturbing close up of a grandma (in puppet form) who Pickle is talking to.
- The Grotesque: In "Body Spray", Pickle's attempt at homemade Crossbow cologne turns users into this.
- Interrupted by the End: The ending of "A Cabbage Day Miracle" when Mr. Mjart is about to sing a Cabbage Day folk song.
- Jerks Use Body Spray: The episode "Body Spray" has Lazer selling Crossbow Body Spray, an amazing-smelling yet extremely expensive (a hundred dollars for just one can) body spray that makes anyone who wears it popular with everybody in town. He later throws a party that is exclusively for people who wear the spray, though Pickle is quick to point out when the duo get turned away that the party is nothing but obnoxious guys obsessed with smelling each other. Peanut couldn't care less and tries to sneak in to steal more Crossbow, only to be threatened to be shot by Lazer with a literal crossbow. Luckily, Pickle saves him using their Gonk-inducing homemade body spray and a small army of animals that are attracted to it.
- Lost Food Grievance: In "Yellow Snow", Champion Horse cries over having dropped his sandwich on the floor of his tank.
- Made of Explodium: In "Yellow Snow", the neighborhood is covered in snow mixed with sulfuric acid from a manure factory, making it highly explosive.
- Medium Blending: Uses it much more extensively then Fish Hooks with cut-out, live-action, puppetry and CGI jumping in when least expected. Oddly enough it's a reversal of Fish Hooks where the main characters were drawn normally while everything else was in a photographic style. Here the main characters are animated and photographic while everything else around them are hand-drawn.
- Misfortune Cookie: In "Freeway Island", Peanut gets hit in the head with a box of Chinese takeout. The fortune cookie inside it reads "Nice try. This place will be your grave."
- Mood Whiplash: In "Gory Agnes", we're treated to a flashback montage of Champion Horse and his lost love, Leilani. After we see her taking a train away from him, it Smash Cuts to Champion Horse standing over her grave.
- Mutagenic Goo: In "Funwagon", Pickle and Peanut spray Lazer's car with toxic waste, causing it to come to life with a 3D face on the hood and a fleshy interior.
- Non-Indicative Name: In this show's universe, zit cream causes zits.
- Non-Ironic Clown: Brownmouth the Clown.
- Noodle Incident: In "Bear-I-Cade", Pickle mentions that he regularly gets into fistfights with beavers.
- No, You:
- In "Tae Kwon Bro", when Peanut is hesitant to take orders from a martial arts expert:Pickle: You just have an authority problem.
Peanut: YOU'RE AN AUTHORITY PROBLEM! - In "Bike Jumper", when a bad attempt at a stunt causes Peanut to smash headfirst into the ground, his spirit leaves his body as Pickle tries to stop him from ascending:Bike Jumper: Pickle, it's too late!
Pickle: You're too late, man!
- In "Tae Kwon Bro", when Peanut is hesitant to take orders from a martial arts expert:
- Odd Organ Up Top: Pickle dates a girl with a foot face.
- Our Werewolves Are Different: In the episode, "Tweenage Lupinus", Peanut thinks he's turned into a werewolf, he tries to make Pickle one. However, both of them turn into werewolves.
- Playful Hacker / The Cracker: The boys adopt Anonymous-esque identities somewhere between the two in the Matrix spoof "Fast Food Pirates", though their actual "hacking" mostly consists of throwing laptops into buildings while they stage a "steal from the rich" plot to give away recalled fast food toys to the kids of East Reno.
- Retraux: The Spoonicorn commercial in "Greg" is intentionally done 80's-90's style, as is anything related to 90’s Adventure Bear.
- Rocket Punch: One of Pickle and Peanut's werewolf powers in "Tweenage Lupinus". Unfortunately, their hands don't grow back.
- Running Gag:
- The announcer saying something that promptly echoes. (Downplayed to the point of being almost entirely absent in the second season, though.)
- Whenever Wayne stares at someone, the camera zooms in on him and becomes letterboxed while an ominous bell sounds. In "Swim Lessons", he does this to himself when he looks at his reflection in the mirror while brushing his teeth, and the camera begins darting back and forth between him and his reflection while getting progressively faster.
- The boys — well, mostly Peanut — don’t seem to park the van so much as crash it to a halt. Gets subverted a couple of times throughout, but is generally played straight.
- Scary Stinging Swarm:
- In "Bee Colony", Pickle entrusts Peanut with his bee colony for the weekend.
- In "The Drone", Wayne attacks Pickle and Peanut with bees and mind-controlled rabbits.
- In "Preschool Reunion", the flashback of Pickle, Peanut, and friends in preschool has them getting attacked by bees on the rundown playground.
- Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: In "Sync or Swim", Pickle and Peanut's team is disqualified from the swim competition because Pickle was competing and is over the age limit. The Sugar Bees are disqualified as well when it turns out their captain is actually a short old lady, but the judge gives them the trophy anyway because she bribed him.
- Self-Deprecation: Some promos show comments from people who love the show ("Pickle and Peanut is my new favorite show!")... and also people who hate it ("Please just cancel this show already.")
- Sinister Shiv: In "Cookie Racket" one of the Sugar Bees stabs Peanut with a switchblade spork.
- Stylistic Suck: From its theme song down to its animation style, the show has a very rough, low budget feel.
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
- In "Scalped", when Pickle, Peanut and Ragga are being pursued by security at a concert they snuck into, Peanut tries to create a diversion by calling for a mosh pit, but it fails when he finds no one's interested and a guy he pushed was with his infant child.
- After Pickle and Peanut are initially happy becoming werewolves, the novelty wears off the next day.
- Take That!: When 90's Adventure Bear goes on a rampage, he protests that his series ran for 9 seasons but never got a DVD release, a jab at the attitude American networks and distributors have adopted toward their older shows in recent years, Disney in particular.
- The Unintelligible: McSweats' cousin McBreezy is completely unintelligible.
- Unit Confusion: In "Bee Colony" Peanut watches a sci-fi B movie that in the intro says the events transpired 1,500 lightyears ago.
- Vomit Indiscretion Shot: When Lazer gets carsick after Peanut and Pickle drive him home.
