Counter-clockwise from bottom: Marshyo, Jackey, and Bubba.
Crazy Candies (疯狂小糖 - Pinyin Fengkuang Xiao Tang) is a Chinese animated series produced by Winsing Animation of GG Bond fame. It originally premiered in 2013.
The series takes place in the Candy Jar, a world of anthropomorphic candies, with the main character, a gummy named Marshyo, going on many adventures with his best friend Jackey and working in a restaurant called the Bao House.
An English dub was produced and aired internationally.
Crazy Candies contains the following tropes:
- All Love Is Unrequited: Bubba has a crush on Chocco, but she barely ever returns his feelings.
- Alliterative Title: Crazy Candies.
- Anthropomorphic Food: The series primarily features anthropomorphic candies as characters, but they've used other foods as characters as well, such as Mr. Seed and a burger dog.
- Batman Can Breathe in Space: In the first episode of Season 3, Mr. Seed is sent to the moon and is able to breathe there without any problems despite not wearing a spacesuit.
- Bears Are Bad News: In Season 6 episode 7, Marshyo and Jackey go to a bamboo forest to grab some of the plant and make bamboo noodles. However, a panda bear appears and isn't happy with them taking the bamboo, so it becomes more muscular and chases them down.
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: In the Season 3 finale, a candy person notices the yeast monster is flat on one side and asks why. Another candy responds saying that it must be a cheaper option since the production team doesn't have enough funds to improve the monster's appearance.
- Camera Abuse: In Season 2 episode 31, the Marshyo delivery robot throws the real Marshyo into the screen, creating a crack in it.
- Captain Ersatz: Marshyo bears such a resemblance to SpongeBob SquarePants that it's easy to make the case that the series, or at least the character, is a knockoff. Both are yellow anthropomorphic cephalothoraxes who wear a quirky pair of pants, have prominent buck teeth, display energetic, childlike personalities, have dim-witted best friends, and love to work at a restaurant.
- Company Cross References: In one Season 3 episode, Mr. Seed digs through the ground hoping to emerge in Bao House and find a treasure he thinks is there. He instead ends up in the worlds of fellow Winsing Animation series Doby & Disy and GG Bond.
- Credits Running Sequence: Maybe not running, necessarily, but the end credits sequences depict the characters walking on a plain environment. From Season 3 onwards, every few seconds, Marshyo will jump and Jackey will make a happy face at the viewers.
- Cupid's Arrow: In Season 2 episode 8, a tiny cupid version of Jackey appears and hits Bon Bon with one of his arrows when he sees the firefly for the first time, signifying his immediately-developed crush on her.
- Derivative Differentiation: The first season is notorious for copying a number of SpongeBob SquarePants episodes and jokes, so for Season 2 they largely stopped doing that apart from at least one episode. In Season 6, they gave the series a story about Marshyo and Jackey finding ingredients to cook gourmet foods for Mr. Seed - SpongeBob SquarePants didn't have any significant overarching plot like that.
- Don't Try This at Home: The text "do not imitate" will appear whenever the characters do anything that could be considered dangerous. In Season 2 episode 36, the text appears on-screen twice, first when Marshyo and Jackey blow on the fire beneath Bubba's bathtub to heat up his bath, and again a few seconds later when Marshyo throws some inflammable gas onto the fire, causing part of Bubba's house to explode.
- Don't Wake the Sleeper: In the first episode, Marshyo wants to sneak past a sleeping Jackey without waking him up so that he can stand a chance of winning a race. He keeps producing loud sounds, but thankfully, Jackey barely even notices and goes back to sleep each time Marshyo makes a sound.
- Early Installment Character-Design Difference: All the main characters receive an overhaul to their design in Season 3, most of the design changes being relatively small. With that said, Mr. Seed receives such a drastic change in appearance - his skin becomes tan and loses the stripes, he has a smaller nose and larger eyes, and he wears clothes when he didn't originally - that his Season 1 and Season 3 designs look like totally different characters.
- Fat Best Friend: Jackey is best friends with Marshyo and quite the plump candy.
- Fetch Quest: In Season 3 episode 28, Marshyo and Jackey's task of finding a book to exchange for Uncle Twinkie's movie ticket becomes one. Elva has the book they want, but they break her mirror and have to find a replacement from Bubba, who wants some roses, which Chocco owns. Chocco is willing to accept a scarf in return, which brings them back to Uncle Twinkie who is wearing one on his head.
- Flashy Protagonists, Bland Extras: The group of main characters have significantly more detailed designs than the background candies, who are just single-colored humanoid shapes with non-moving faces drawn onto them.
- Flexing Those Non-Biceps: In Season 1 episode 28, Marshyo attempts to flex in front of Sugarman, only for his arms to be easily blown around in the wind instead of producing any bulging biceps.
- Flowers of Romance: In Season 2 episode 8, Bon Bon offers his firefly crush a rose, which she then throws into a nearby target that she hits a bullseye on, pointy end in.
- Good Angel, Bad Angel: In the first episode, during the race, Marshyo sees a candy struggling to make it out of a chocolate lake. A devil version of him appears and tells him not to save her, since she'll have a higher chance of winning if he does. Then an angel version of him appears and tells him to save the candy since she's a friend of his. The devil and angel butt heads with their differing choices for a few seconds before Marshyo decides to save the candy.
- Goofy Buckteeth: Marshyo, much like a certain Nickelodeon sponge of which he's a Captain Ersatz, has buck teeth that accentuate his goofy, happy-go-lucky personality.
- Identical Grandson: Season 2 episode 15 shows that Elva's ancestors, who have been entering in the Candy Jar's sweetest candy competition for a century, are all just Palette Swaps of her.
- Love at First Sight: In Season 2 episode 8, Bon Bon falls in love with a female firefly the moment he sees her while adjusting Marshyo's television satellite dish.
- The Mockbuster: It's meant to be China's answer to SpongeBob SquarePants, with the characters having similar personalities and the series having a similar hyperactive feel to it. The knockoff aspect is more pronounced in Season 1, which outright tries to copy some episode plots and plot points from SpongeBob SquarePants - for example, episodes 2, 28, and 33 of that season are copies of "The Paper", "MuscleBob BuffPants", and "Snowball Effect" respectively in terms of their basic premises and plagiarize a number of jokes and plot beats from them.
- No Ending: The Season 3 premiere, "Have a Class", ends without resolving the plot point of the characters learning how to make hamburgers to regain their customers' interest.
- Pen Pals: One episode is about Marshyo wanting to make a pen pal, but failing to capture anyone's interest. He eventually decides to become his own pen pal and write letters to himself, for which the other candy folks make fun of him.
- Quarter Hour Short: Season 1 and 2 episodes are somewhere around 10 minutes long. Starting in Season 3, the episode length was shortened to around 7-8 minutes.
- Robot Me: In Season 2 episode 31, Marshyo and Jackey invent delivery robots that look much like them, albeit the Marshyo one has three pairs of arms instead of one. They both start to malfunction, leading to the Jackey one in particular consuming everyone and everything it can grab.
- Shout-Out:
- In Season 2 episode 31, to upset the Jackey robot's stomach and get it to vomit out everything it's swallowed, Marshyo and Jackey do the Gangham Style dance.
- In Season 2 episode 36, Marshyo and Jackey's talk about giving Bubba a hot bath devolves into them doing the Gangham Style dance again.
- Signature Laugh: Marshyo has a signature laugh that sounds something like "Baa-haa-haa-haa-haa!", not unlike the Nickelodeon sponge he was created as a knockoff of.
- Sick Episode: In Season 2 episode 36, Bubba comes down with a cold after taking a cold bath and alienates the customers and other workers at the Bao House by working there anyway and sneezing on them. Eventually, Marshyo and Jackey take it upon themselves to help Bubba get better.
- Simpleton Voice: Marshyo's ditzy friend Jackey has a deep-pitched voice.
- Species Surname: Mr. Seed is exactly that, a seed.
- The Song Remains the Same: The original Chinese versions of the theme songs have lyrics, but the English dub doesn't translate them, instead removing the vocals.
- Toilet Humor: In Season 2 episode 14, Wade, an escaped insane asylum patient, tries to break into Marshyo's safe to see what his most prized treasure is. Marshyo is surprisingly easy on him when Wade simply asks for the item inside the safe as a birthday present, only for Wade to find out that it's a diaper with the first poop that Marshyo ever made, with the brown stuff forming a smiley face.
- Vanity License Plate: The cooking car Marshyo and Jackey drive in Season 6 has the license plate "FKXT", short for the series' Chinese title, Fengkuang Xiao Tang.
- Winged Soul Flies Off at Death: In Season 2 episode 31, Marshyo and Jackey pass by a candy person so fast and so many times that it kills them, sending their soul flying upwards.
