See also:
- Accidental Innuendo:
- In "Rosa's Birthday", Krash decides to give Rosa a lampshade as a birthday present, and wears it on his head throughout the episode. It doesn't help that after they get stuck in a desert, he and Chiko, both wearing parts of it, are seen staggering.
- In "The Reconstruction", Krash and Chiko decide to build a new room for the latter. As they begin, it cuts to an outside view of the house violently shaking, making it look like they are doing... something else.
- Archive Panic: The original run alone has 215 episodes, with the 2012 CGI continuation, a 2020 2D revival and spin-offs like PinCode bringing it to over 450.
- Awesome Music: Has its own page.
- Base-Breaking Character:
- Out of nine main characters (partially thanks to her Flanderization), Rosa is the most divisive. She's either seen as cute, sweet and compassionate, or hated for being capricious, egoistical and whiny.
- Pandy from New Adventures was heavily pushed as the 10th main character (not counting Bibi), but she wasn't received as well as expected. Those who wanted to see more episodes with old characters were disappointed by the fact that she had a lead role in most episodes following her debut, to the point that she felt forced. Adding to that is her personality, which in many ways was a carbon copy of Krash's. Other fans either didn't mind her or felt that she is an interesting character, but a wasted potential that could have become a mainstay if she had more unique characterisation.
- Broken Base:
- Show's shift to CGI with Team Invincible and New Adventures has broken its fans into two groups: one hates CGI, another one doesn't mind them.
- Which English dub do you prefer? A Cultural Translation by 4Kids, despite their usual graphical and musical changes, (though frankly only partial) and some new jokes added in being hit-and-miss, was still well-received and fondly remembered by those who watched it back in the day as one of the last good things to come out from them. Studio 100 and FUN Union dubs are much more faithful to the original script, but their handling of voice acting and/or songs can be questionable at times.
- Crosses the Line Twice:
- "Chiko and His Health" has a glorious Stinger where Krash finds out (by reading medical encyclopaedia) that he has all signs of dementia in his usual cheerful fashion.
- "Extreme Trust" revolves about Krash helping Chiko to find his ball with very unusual methods (like flying by a kite). When Chiko became enraged with his ideas, Krash assumes that his friend might have trust issues.
- New season episode "Executors" is about Olga planning her funeral after a heart attack. It may be shocking (given the nature of the media)... but Chiko's will to impale Olga's body with a Wooden Stake certainly anchors the episode on said territory.
- Ensemble Dark Horse:
- Bibi doesn't appear often, but fans see him as one of the best additions to the show and is sometimes thought of as the official 10th main character, despite not really being considered to be such by the creators themselves.
- Despite only appearing in "The Savage Clone" and "The Universe is Under Supervision", Dokko's Clone became a fan-favorite, especially among foreign audience.
- Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The show is very popular in China, being one of the few countries to export some of the printed media based on it. The series was also chosen for Russian-Chinese co-production by CCTV, Panda and Krash, which stars their own panda mascot and one of the main characters from KikoRiki, akin to their co-productions with other foreign studios.
- Harsher in Hindsight: "Clean sport" shows Chiko winning the marathon while drinking a mysterious cardboard drink, which Krash mistakes for doping and tries to bust him for cheating. (it turns out to be a regular milk) For a series made in Russia, the episode earned itself a lot of irony after all the controversy with the massive Russian state-sponsored doping program that happened few years after the episode was made.
- Hilarious in Hindsight:
- The ending to a 2009 game KikoRiki. Parallel Worlds, initially intended to be just a joke, ended up lampshading New Adventures three years later. In it, Krash and Chiko are teleported to another dimension, just like at the beginning of the game. The difference is that while the dimension they were in for the course of the game is claymation, the second teleportation takes them to the CGI-animated world. Krash even cheerfully exclaims "New Adventures!"
- In the 4Kids dub of "Little Big Sea", Carlin compares the water waste to a morning breath of his aunt Gertrude - a name of German origin. This was of course made up by 4Kids and the original show barerly ever made any mentions of characters' relatives. Four years later, however, in New Adventures episode "The Inheritance", Carlin learns that he had an third great-great aunt named Swanett Ravenstein von Carlin (Amalia Kaitanovna von Karych in the original). Thus, the idea of Carlin having a German aunt doesn't sound ridiculous anymore.
- Ho Yay:
- Krash and Chiko are almost literally inseparable from each other. They are the only two to live very close, rarely not appear together and have more dynamic with each other than anyone else. There's also one time Chiko told Krash to call him a "boss", and that he won't go wrong with that.
- Also common with Barry and Dokko. For example, one of the ABC's (in Russian)
has two babysit baby Krash and bicker like an old couple.
- Inferred Holocaust: In "Black and White Movie" Dokko mentions that the entire world has become black and white. Even moreso, he reveals to have contacted all governments of the Earth and learned that their black and white capital cities are experiencing panic and then (possibly as an example) brings up that their traffic lights are not working properly. We are only led to assume the whole incident had no casualties, though the fact that the entire episode turns out to be Rosa's dream, it was intentional.
- Memetic Mutation:
- Gogoriki [X] style Explanation
- Chipalina Explanation
- I think I'll call you... Goofball! Explanation
- "What Pin did in the 40s", and jokes about Pin being a Nazi in general.
- No Problem with Licensed Games: "Параллельные миры" ("Parallel Worlds") is a Point-and-Click Adventure Game about Krash and Chiko getting transported into an alternative universe where the entire world is made out of modeling clay. The game has been well received by both fans of the show, and fans of adventure games alike, thanks to its charming claymation art style, and the added puzzle element of Krash and Chiko having different interactions with items and world objects.
- Periphery Demographic: Part of reason why the series became so beloved in Russia. It's aimed at young children, but earned a lot of adult viewers for its use of Parental Bonus and philosophical subtext. (Especially in episodes written by Aleksey Lebedev.)
- The Problem with Licensed Games: Throughout 2000s and early 2010s, there have been released over a dozen of licensed KikoRiki games exclusive to Russia, with all of them being aimed at young kids, and some featuring educational elements. The general consensus on those is that they are alright for their target audience, but have little to no redeeming qualities for anyone over the age of 10. Some examples are worse than the rest, though:
- "Калейдоскоп игр" ("The Kaleidoscope of Games") is a series of Minigame Games, which are actually offline ports of flash games previously hosted on smeshariki.ru. The games themselves range in quality from mediocre to barely playable, and at least half of them aren't even directly themed around the show's setting or any of the characters.
- "Собери Страну Смешариков!" ("Build the KikoRiki Land!") is a Point-and-Click Advertisement Game for a set of wooden toys themed around the eponymous setting. The gameplay revolves around finding parts of the aforementioned toys scattered around six world screens and two mini-games: a PacMan clone and a Frogger-like. The main issue is that toy parts only ever appear on screens at random – you have to pray that a new set will spawn after you spend enough time playing one of the mini-games, both of which are quite janky. The toy sets themselves are also not very impressive: some are fine enough, others don't even look like they are related to the KikoRiki setting.
- "Калейдоскоп игр" ("The Kaleidoscope of Games") is a series of Minigame Games, which are actually offline ports of flash games previously hosted on smeshariki.ru
- Unintentional Period Piece: In "Forget Everything", Wally undergoes hypnosis that makes him far more intelligent among other things. When Carlin brings him back to normal, Krash asks what Burundi's capital city is. He doesn't know the answer, but when his friends are too busy cheering, he tells the audience that it is Bujumbura. This was true until 2019, when Gitega became that country's political capital city, thus ensuring the original intention of the scene (an implication that Wally might not have been fully brought back to his old-self) would be lost to time.
