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The Movie

  • Adorkable:
    • Dracula is a HUGE, utterly sweet dork as a father, and later grandfather. It’s taken up to eleven when he meets Ericka in the third film.
    • Mavis gets quite giddy at the prospect of traveling the world or thinking about Jonathan.
  • Base-Breaking Character: Jonathan. Either he's a funny comic foil to Dracula or an annoying, Totally Radical tagalong who takes screentime away from the other monsters.
  • Cargo Ship: Jonathan sure loves his backpack.
  • Creepy Cute: Mavis is 118, can turn into a bat (albeit a very adorable one), crawl on walls, can't go out during the day, and has no reflection, but otherwise, young Mavis appears to be a normal, sweet teenage girl.
  • Critical Dissonance: Movie critics gave the film mixed reviews, but audiences liked it anyway; the film earned an A-minus from Cinemascore. In fact, the public liked the movie so much that it led the film to an opening weekend total of $42.5 million. It was the best opening weekend ever for a Sony Pictures Animation feature, topping the $30.3 million opening of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs in 2009, as well as the biggest opening weekend ever for the month of September. It went on to make $358.4 million worldwide against a budget of $85 million, and received two sequels that performed similarly well.
  • Crossover Ship:
  • Demographically Inappropriate Humor:
  • Ensemble Dark Horse: Winnie, perhaps due to her ludicrously precise sense of smell (she was able to sniff Jonathan's shirt and tell Drac not only which direction he went, but which airport he was going to, which flight he was taking and what the meal the flight was serving was). She proved popular enough to receive major roles in later installments.
  • Fan Nickname: Dr. Orpheus: The Movie from those who noticed a comparison between Dracula and Mavis to Dr. Orpheus and his daughter Triana from The Venture Bros.. Both are single dads with a Large Ham nature, Orpheus has been mistaken for Dracula, both daughters are a Perky Goth with short hair, a black clothes, and striped stockings, and both girls have an Adorkable love interest.
  • First Installment Wins: Though the sequels definitely have their fans; the first film has still received better fan praise than them.
  • Friendly Fandoms: With The Nightmare Before Christmas and Van Helsing. Fans overlapping with the former like them because they are fantasy animated movies with monster protagonists that are ideal to watch during the Halloween season. Fans overlapping with the latter like seeing their favorite classic monsters crossover together.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Ho Yay:
    • Jonathan and Dracula. Jonathan is the only one that can get him to lighten up, the common romantic comedy trope Race for Your Love was used with those two, and the scene where Jonathan tells Mavis he hates monsters and leaves? He does that for Dracula. He hurts the supposed love of his life for him. Of course he later says that he did it to avoid being eaten, but still. Hilarious in Hindsight, given that this dynamic was also true of their namesakes.
    • Dracula's best friends are unable to convince him to sing, even for his beloved daughter Mavis's birthday party and getting a Game Face for their troubles. Yet, all Johnny has to do is ask before Dracula joins in during the Dance Party Ending...
    • To a lesser extent, there's Griffin's evident crush (man-crush, maybe?) on Drac. See Ambiguously Gay on the front page.
  • Just Here for Godzilla:
    • Most of the animation fans' interest in this movie comes solely from the fact that Genndy Tartakovsky directed it. Many people are not interested in the film itself and just want to see it because they think it will help his career if they do. The fact that he's said "if this film does well, they might let me do a Samurai Jack movie" only adds to it. Indeed, a fifth season of Samurai Jack premiered in 2017.
    • The media has also made a huge deal over the fact that Selena Gomez is voicing Mavis, and her popularity is a huge draw for the teeny-bopper crowd. Same for Adam Sandler fans as well.
  • Memetic Mutation:
    • In Real Life, Dracula's denial quickly became a Memetic Mutation in itself.
    • So is Mavis' "Pouty Bat Face."
    • It's modestly popular for YouTube users to edit the scene where Dracula reacts to "Sexy and I Know It" played from Jonathan's music player, replacing "Sexy" with other random songs.
    • Similarly, it's become decently popular for people to take the clip of Dracula bursting into rap alongside Jonathan and replace the audio usually with completely absurd results.
    • "Haha Jonathan, you are banging my daughter"Explanation 
    • This dude's whole reason for being a monster is being French.Explanation 
    • The fact that the main character is named Jonathan and has a familial issue regarding vampires has drawn jokes from a certain fandom.
  • Retroactive Recognition: Rebecca Sugar and Victor Courtright had one of their first professional animation jobs as storyboard artists for this film.
  • Spiritual Licensee: As mentioned on the trivia page, while not produced by Happy Madison Productions, pretty much everyone who's regularly involved in the company's films, up to and including their distributor, is involved. As such, it's all but legally considered a Happy Madison film by many audiences.
  • Squick: Quasimodo constantly sweating is kinda gross. Plus, it’s never explained why he sweats so much.
  • Theme Pairing: Rapunzel from Tangled and Mavis are both girls isolated from the real world by their overprotective parents and therefore are very eager to go and explore it. Golden Blond and Jet Black has them as the main pairing.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
    • Quasimodo is so underused that his scenes could be cropped out entirely and it wouldn't really ruin the flow of the movie.
    • Many critics complained that Dracula's friends were underused and could've had more screen time and character development instead of wasting it on Johnny. This is one thing many think the sequels did better.
  • Ugly Cute: Winnie, daughter of Wayne the Wolfman.
  • The Woobie: Both Mavis and Dracula. It's because of the big blue eyes that you just want to give them a hug.

The Video Game

  • Anti-Climax Boss: Quasimodo is this in both the movie and the game, despite being the closest thing the movie has to a Big Bad. The game is exceptionally bad about this, where every "boss" in the game falls into this trope. To truly hammer it home, your only reward for beating Quasimodo are a few words of dialogue immediately followed by the end credits!
  • Game-Breaking Bug: A pretty bad one for the game if you're looking for replay value. On some cartridges, if you beat the game and try to reload the save file, you will be greeted by a load error message, which prevents you from replaying it at all.
  • Goddamned Bats: The fish-tossing zombie waiters in the game.
  • No Problem with Licensed Games: Though nothing truly outstanding, the Nintendo 3DS game is pretty okay. Unfortunately, if you're unlucky to have one of those cartridges that crashes if you try to load a save....

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