YMMV / Madagascar

• Crosses the Line Twice: Shares a page with the rest of the series.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • The Penguins and King Julien XIII. The Penguins were only a sub-plot to start and keep things rolling, and King Julien was only intended to have two lines, but they became so popular that not only did they get extended roles, but they also got larger roles in the sequel, and then they got a hugely popular spin-off even though nobody knows how they got back to the Zoo in that continuity. Have we also mentioned they got their own movie?
  • Nana, due to her status as a Memetic Badass and being a great source of Black Comedy. Her popularity caused her to become part of the Big Bad Ensemble of the second movie.
• Genius Bonus: Considering how most people had probably never heard of fossa before this movie, the fact that the lemurs misspell it "foosa" is a joke that goes over most people's heads.
• Fanfic Fuel:
  • What if lemurs didn't brought Zoosters to their village, resulting in Alex telling his friends about his dream, probably avoiding his Sanity Slippage?
  • This movie established that animals in Madagascar series can go savage. Does this also apply to herbivores? What if it was Gloria who had gone savage, and not Alex?
  • When Alex, Gloria and Melman go looking for Marty, Melman asks if he can stay at the zoo in case the zebra returns before joining them. What would had happened if Melman had stayed at the zoo?
  • A potential plot for Accusation Fic where Marty, Gloria and Melman call out Maurice for distrusting Alex just because he's a carnivore.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • When Alex wakes up in the crate, he exclaims "Not the box!" and suffers a panic attack before he hears Marty next to him. It hits harder after watching Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, where you realize Alex has been trapped in a crate before as a cub.
  • A tamer example: "the wild", Marty's Arc Words. After one discovers that this was a pre-emptive ripoff of The Wild, it not only feels awkward, but kind of sleazy.
  • When the gang first washes up on the island, Melman deduces that they have arrived in San Diego, and Alex laments having to compete with Shamu and his "smug little grin". Modern audiences who have seen Black Fish would know Shamu is anything but smug.
• He Really Can Act: Ben Stiller was more known as a comedic actor before this film. However, his performance when Alex realizes he almost killed Marty during his bout of Horror Hunger is shockingly heartwrenching.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Alex threatens to clone Marty after killing him, and then kill all his clones. In the sequel, while Alex doesn't harm them, Marty encounters a herd of zebras, that are absolutely identical to him and have Marty's voice, which causes Alex to confuse Marty with other zebras.
  • Melman was originally an okapi, but was changed to a giraffe for fear of audiences not knowing what an okapi is. In 2013, in the Valentine's special Madly Madagascar, an okapi character appears as Marty's love interest.
  • During the scene with Marty ice skating at the Rockefeller Park rink, a parody of the NBC News building dubbed PDI News (a reference to Pacific Data Images, the division of DreamWorks Animation that produced the film) can be spotted in the background. NBC's parent company, NBCUniversal, would later buy DreamWorks Animation in 2016.
  • In the Korean dub, watching Alex talking to "Spaulding" (a reference to "Wilson" from Cast Away) is particularly funny once you remember that Song Kang-ho, the voice of Alex in that version, is commonly referred to as "the Korean Tom Hanks".
  • In Polish dub, when Alex searches for his friends, two of the names he mumbles are Lolek and Bolek. Few years later, in The Penguins of Madagascar, the Central Park Zoo resident gorillas are named Bolo and Lolo in the show's Polish dub.
  • In the Polish dub, Alex is voiced by Artur Żmijewski. This won't be the only time when he will voice a lion (even though Alex and Scar are on different sides of morality spectrum).
• Ho Yay:
  • Alex, with his flamboyant, Broadway style dance maneuvers, overexcited personality, and suspiciously close relationship with his best friend, Marty the zebra. In the first film, he gets very upset and concerned when Marty leaves the zoo to find the wild. And when they all become stranded in Madagascar, Alex's hunger grows for meat, so with Marty being the closest thing to stake available he licks his rump in his sleep and in another scenario, bites him on the butt when he reverts to his primal instincts and in the second one, he confuses Marty with the other identical zebras multiple times, causing a strain on their friendship and finally there's their reconciliation near the end, where Alex finally manages to tell Marty from the rest of the zebra herd, by his bite mark on Marty's rear from the last film.
  • Julien's rather touchy-feely with Maurice.
    Julien: What is a simple bite on the buttocks among friends? (backs up in front of Maurice) Here, give me a nibble.
• Memetic Mutation: Shares a page with the rest of the series.
• Squick: Melman giving Marty his first rectal thermometer as a birthday gift. What makes it so gross is that he tells him this after Marty put it in his mouth. No wonder Marty spits it right out after hearing that.
  • There’s also Melman sucking on a urinal cake, thinking it was a mint, then picking it back up from the floor, shortly after Alex took it out of his mouth.
• Superlative Dubbing: The Russian dub is often considered to be superior to the original English version. It makes excellent usage of Russian slang and idioms and a lot of line deliveries have more energy compared to the original.
• Woolseyism:
  • In the original English during the film's Meadow Run scene, Marty says: "Sugar Honey Ice Tea!" (look at the first letter of each word). In the Spanish dub, he says: "‎Miércoles!" ("Wednesday"), a common Spanish euphemism for "tercoles" (and "mierda" is Spanish for "shit", so the acronym joke is replaced with a Last Second Vowel Swap). In the Croatian dub, he straight up says "shit" (the English word, not the translation) and mixes it with "šibam ja dalje" (roughly "I'm outta here") where the first word incorporates the English word, essentially creating a bilingual pun.
  • In German they use "Himmel, Arm und Wolkenbruch (heaven, arm and cloudburts)", which everyone will be able to tell you is what adults turn "Himmel, Arsch (ass) und Wolkenbruch" into when kids are around. It's the same principal as "Scheibenkleister" and "Scheiße". You know "Schhhh...eibenkleister." "Sshhhh...eeesh."
  • In Polish dub, Marty in the aforementioned scene says instead: "Ożeż rym do bolera!" ("Oh my goodness, a rhyme to the bolero!") with "bolero" rhyming with the Polish curse word "cholera".
  • In one scene, King Julien refers to the zoo animals as the New York Giants. Since American football is practically unknown in Hungary, in the Hungarian dub Julien calls them the "Gang of New York" instead, making it a Shout-Out to Gangs of New York.
  • During the scene where Alex finds himself stranded on the beach, he mumbles his friends' names before mangling them and then mumbling a couple of unrelated names out of exhaustion. In the original these names are the names of newsmen, Regis (Regis Philbin), Kelly (Kelly Ripa), Matt (Matt Lauer), Katie (Katie Couric), and Al (Al Roker), while in the Croatian and Latin American dub these were changed to Shrek and Fiona.
    • In the Polish dub those names were changed into Lolek and Bolek and Kasia and Tomek, with the latter ones being a reference to the Polish comedy show Kasia and Tomek that ended in 2004, a year before the premiere of Madagascar.

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