The Beano Video (later retitled The Beano All-Stars for its DVD release) was the first full-length animated special based on the long-running children's comic The Beano. It's made up of short episodes featuring the various characters, most of which are adapted from stories from the 1992 Beano Annual — albeit one of Dennis the Menace's segments ("The Pink Glove") and one of the Bash Street Kids segments ("Lake Beautiful") are adaptations of multi-issue Story Arcs from the main comic.
Tropes include:
- Adaptation Distillation: The Pink Glove and Lake Beautiful segments both cut down various gags from their original storylines, in order to bring them more in line with the segments from the rest of the video.
- Adaptational Dye-Job:
- A weirdly inconsistent one — Olive, the Bash Street Kids' lunchlady, has grey hair in the comics, but is drawn with blonde hair in their first segment here, and then brown in their second segment.
- Walter the Softy's mother is drawn with brown hair here, whereas in the comics at the time, she shared the same black hair as her son.
- Adapted Out: Presumably in order to cut down on the number of characters they needed to draw in the Bash Street Kids segments, Toots is missing from two of them, the school janitor is only seen once (and from behind, at that), and Cuthbert Cringeworthy doesn't appear at all.
- And Your Little Dog, Too!: Played with; Dennis's actual dog, Gnasher isn't targeted by the Pink Glove, but his pig, Rasher, is.
- Answer Cut: When the Three Bears return to their cave to find that all of their porridge has disappeared, Pa asks where it has all gone to, then the scene fades to the horse they stole earlier trotting away with a Balloon Belly, revealing that he was the one who ate their porridge.
- Artifact Title: While it was retitled as The Beano All-Stars for DVD and streaming video, its on-screen title is still The Beano Video.
- Bait-and-Switch: The Pink Glove is set up to be Walter the Softy, but actually turns out to be his mother.
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: The characters will address the audience at several points throughout the video.
- At the end of the first Three Bears segment, "Porridge", the horse, who had eaten all of the Bears' porridge oats, turns to the viewers and says to them "Who knows, viewers? Who knows?" after Pa asks where their oats have gone.
- Depending on the Artist:
- For whatever reason, Minnie the Minx is animated with much more fluidity in her segments, standing out compared to the Limited Animation featured elsewhere.
- The Three Bears mostly use the designs they were given by David Parkins, who was drawing the strip in the comic at that time. Because some of their animation is traced over from the 1992 Beano annual, however, at certain points they revert to the designs used by Parkins' predecessor, Bob Dewar.
- Exact Words: Minnix the Minx is forbidden by her father to try picking apples out of his tree, but allowed to take any that fall. Since her father didn't specify that they had to fall of their own accord, however, she decides to help them on their way.
- Gone Horribly Right: The Bash Street Kids' trip to Lake Beautiful solves the problem of Plug looking so much uglier than the rest of the class... by making all the other kids just as ugly as him.
- Humiliation Conga: What Dennis is on the receiving end of from the Pink Glove. He's naturally annoyed that he's getting one of these instead of dishing it out.
- Inexplicably Identical Individuals: Minnie the Minx's father and the Bash Street Kids' teacher have almost identical character designs, due to them both having the same original artist, Leo Baxendale. In the comics at the time this wasn't too noticeable, as their respective strips had different artists by that point (Jim Petrie did Minnie, while David Sutherland did the Bash Street Kids), but with the animation adopting a much more standardized style across all the segments here, they end up looking near-identical, just with different moustaches, and Teacher having glasses and a mortar board.
- Left Hanging: One of the Three Bears segments adapts the first of three segments from the 1992 Beano Annual, where they find and adopt a baby dragon. The other two segments aren't adapted, however, meaning the story ends abruptly and is never resolved.
- Limited Animation: Incredibly so, even compared to its sequel. A lot of the animation is made up of traced-over images from the comic, with just the mouths and maybe a limb or two animated. It's most pronounced in the Bash Street Kids segments, where due to their being a lot more characters on-screen at any given moment, usually only one or two of them is actually animated, with the rest being completely motionless. Many of the backgrounds are also just solid colours, lacking any form of detail or shading.
- Mama Bear: The reason why Walter the Softy's mother takes on the identity of The Pink Glove, as she's gotten tired of Dennis humiliating her son, and Dennis's own parents being completely ineffective at stopping him.
- Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: The American accents for the Three Bears tend to wander around quite a bit.
- Shout-Out: The Bash Street Kids segment has one to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, with the kids being dropped out of their plane onto the mountains of Tibet while riding a sledge.
- Stock "Yuck!": In addition to the usual jokes you'd expect about school dinners in the Bash Street Kids segment, one is also made about airline food, which is shown to be just as inedible. And monastery food is shown to be even worse.
- Vocal Dissonance: The character voices are hit-and-miss as to whether they sound appropriate for the ages of the characters, but Walter the Softy is easily the most glaring example, sounding more like a stereotypical nerdy middle-aged man than a pre-teen boy.
- Worthy Opponent: One of the reasons why Dennis is able to work out that the Pink Glove actually isn't Walter after all — the Pink Glove is far too adept at humiliating Dennis, something Walter wouldn't even begin to be capable of doing.
- Your Size May Vary: Happens a lot, most notably with Gnasher (and Gnipper, when he's present) in Dennis the Menace's segments, and Spotty in the Bash Street Kids segments.
