∇

troperville

∇

tools

∇

toys

• Acceptable Targets: Nigel hates Dutch people for no good reason. Austin himself hates carnies (carnival workers) because they have "small hands.... and smell like cabbage." His hate for the Dutch might be justified. See Freudian Excuse on the main page. He's also not fond of Belgians because "they share a border with the Dutch" (Michael Caine makes this line awesome).
• Angst? What Angst?: Austin doesn't even particularly seem to care that Vanessa was a Fembot and is now dead. He's a swinger!
  • Also, he doesn't seem to care all that much when Basil admits that they suspected it all along, and then quickly changes the subject and never mentions it again.
• Awesome Music: George S. Clinton's music for all three movies is a loving homage of the John Barry Bond scores, including a fantastic villainous theme for Dr Evil.
  • Soul Bossa Nova.
  • "Austin Powers" by the Wondermints for the first movie; sadly, very little of it gets heard while Mike Myers'... er, Ming Tea's "BBC" gets played in its entirety AND has its own music video alongside the credits. It can be heard in all its glory on the soundtrack album, and holds up a lot better years later than Ming Tea's effort.
  • There's also rapper Ludacris's 2004 song Number One Spot, which not only samples the series' intro theme, but also includes several references to the series.
  "In court I never show up like Austin Powers's fah-za."
• Director Displacement
• Discredited Meme: There has been an Internet Backlash against the meme from Memetic Mutation. Using any one of them today immediately brands you a loser, even if jesting.
• Evil Is Sexy: Alotta Fagina and Ivana Humpalot are supposed to be this because they are The Vamp for their movie.
• Fountain of Memes: Many: "Oh behave, baby!", "Yeah Baby, Yeah!" "Margin of Evil." etc
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Man Of Mystery ended on a Patrick Stewart Speech about how the spirit of The Sixties was living more responsibly in The Nineties. Highly cynical Turn of the Millennium ideas about sex, war and egotism make even a Chivalrous Pervert like Austin look like a Wide-Eyed Idealist.
  • You may never look at Random Task from Man of Mystery the same way again.
    • And now this turns From Bad to Worse.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • One of the songs in the first movie's credits rolls off a list of BBC channels which didn't exist at the time, such as BBC Three and BBC Four.
    • Odd as it sounds, those could have been references to the BBC's radio channels. Both Radio 3 and 4 have been going since the late sixties.
  • Dr Evil originally wants one million dollars in exchange for not trying to take over the world. Number Two tells him that one million dollars is a relatively modest hostage demand in the 1990's. He then ups the bid to "one hundred... 'billion... dollars!" His demand seems telling in light of Ireland's 90 billion euro EU bailout.
  • While snooping around Alotta Fagina's penthouse in the first movie, Austin discovers a folder with some of Virtucon's evil plots listed inside. In between "Human Organ Trafficing" and "Project Vulcan" is... "Carrot Top Movie". In the following year, they made Chairman Of The Board.
  • In the movie-in-the-movie in Goldmember, Kevin Spacey plays Dr. Evil, a bald, evil super genius. He'd later go on to play a second bald, evil super genius a few years later in another film.
    • Also, the movie-in-the-movie is a Darker and Edgier version of Austin Powers. A few years later, the James Bond franchise would do something similar with the Daniel Craig films.
  • "Who throws a shoe? Honestly!" Cue the Bush "Shoe Incident".
  • Machine-gun breasts? Who would ever do that again?
  • In the second movie when Dr. Evil tells Austin "I am your father", Austin says "Really?" in a rather hopeful tone of voice. Come the third movie, and you find that his relationship with his father is traumatic enough that he might have actually wanted Dr. Evil to be his dad.
    • And then it turns out that they're actually brothers.
  • When Dr. Evil says "there's nothing more pathetic than an aging hipster", he probably means "hipster" in the old 40s-60s sense, as that is where both he and Austin are from and the newer use was in its infancy when the movie came out in 1997. To a 2010s audience the line may seem puzzling, as most people labled with the newer term are in their 40s at most, but may become hilarious in a different way in a few decades.
• Idiot Plot: In the first movie Dr Evil threatens to set off every volcano on Earth if he isn't given $100 Billion. He tells Austin that he plans to set the volcanoes off anyway. If every volcano on Earth erupted, entire continents- including North America, where Dr Evil and his cohorts are based- would be annihilated (by supervolcanoes like Yellowstone, for instance), the sky would be covered in black ash for thousands if not millions of years, and virtually every living thing on Earth would die, including humanity. So, firstly, Dr Evil's money would be worthless, and secondly, and a bit more annoyingly from his point of view, Dr Evil and everyone in his organization would be dead. Justified since its a spoof film plus, of course, its Dr Evil.
• Memetic Mutation: "Yeah baby!", "Shagadelic" and "Oh, behave!"
  • "Oh no, I've gone cross-eyed. "
  • "Judo Chop!"
  • "One MILLION dollars!" *Puts little finger to mouth*
    • "One MILLION dollars" was so overplayed, even King Hussein of Jordan was doing it before he died.
  • Sharks with Frickin' Laser Beams!
  • Also "The sheer mechanics are mind-boggling!" and "You look like a baby. I eat babies. Get in my belly."
    • Though mostly just "GET IN MAH BELLEH!"
  • And "When Dr. Evil gets angry, Mr. Bigglesworth gets upset. And when Mr. Bigglesworth gets upset... people DIE!"
  • Each film includes a sequence of various on-lookers (and celebrity cameos) noticing something in the sky, with the camera cutting to a new shot right when they say a euphemism.
  • It is argued that the second and third films carried out variations on jokes from the first in order to force them into becoming memetic.
  • And I'm spent.
  • I, too, like to live dangerously.
• MST3K Mantra: When Austin contemplates the complexities of time travel, Basil tells him this. Austin then passes it along to the audience.
• One-Scene Wonder: Nathan Lane in Goldmember.
  • And Will Ferrell as Mustafa.
• Retroactive Recognition: in the Rent A Zilla scene from the third movie, there's a cameo by Masi Oka - now with all the time-travel involved, where was Hiro Nakamura when you needed him?
• Squick: Fat Bastard is deliberately written to be Squick.
• Values Dissonance: The first movie gets a number of jokes about The Sixties and The Nineties being different decades with different social mores. Austin ends up declaring that the actual acts of liberal drug use and sex of the sixties wasn't just about liberal drug use and sex for the sake of having those things, it was about freedom, and expressing and enjoying that freedom, a spirit that lives on strong in the nineties.