Characters / Capitol Critters

Max:

Voiced by: Neil Patrick Harris

The main character, a mouse from Nebraska. He comes to live with his cousin in Washington D.C. after his mother, father and all of his brothers and sisters are killed by exterminators. His simple country ways and gentle nature often leave him at a loss in the hustle and bustle of his fellow critters in the capitol.

• Actual Pacifist: He hates all kinds of violence, for any reason. He even hated Jammet's idea to kill President Cat. In fact, when he ends up severely injuring the same cat in attempt to rescue another mouse, he breaks down into tears, and is overjoyed to the point of hysteria when he didn't end up killing him.
• All-Loving Hero: He loves everyone regardless of race, motive, or circumstance: humans, mice, rats, roaches... even the cats, who would likely eat him given the chance.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Upon seeing President Cat about to kill a Japanese mouse girl, he uses a light fixture to bash him on the head with nearly enough force to kill him. Then he spends the rest of the day wallowing in angst over what he's done.
• Break the Cutie: The man can hardly catch a break. He watched his own family get gassed to death in the first episode and has nightmares about it. When the Capitol was gassed later on he suffered a PTSD reaction. He had an eotional breakdown when he nearly killed President Cat, and was nearly murdered by forced drug overdose.
• The Chew Toy: The universe seems to like hurting him in various over-the-top ways, especially favoring Slapstick.
  Max: "I don't ever want to go outside for the rest of my life."
• Chick Magnet: In If Loving You Is Wrong, he gets attacked by a bunch of female hamsters and smothered with kisses. Miko also falls for him pretty quickly.
• Country Mouse: He comes from a farmhouse, and was forced to move to the capitol after his family was killed.
• Deadpan Snarker: For being the All-Loving Hero of the show, he has an extremely dry sense of humor.
• Double Standard Rape: Female on Male: It's heavily implied that he ended up on the receiving end of this trope in the final episode.
  • After Jammet freed Violet from her cage, Max noticed that Violet's owner was heartbroken at her disappearance. He goes to a local pet shop to find her a replacement hamster, and ends up falling into a cage filled with female hamsters. They apparently hadn't seen a man in quite a long time, because they all immediately tackle him and start tearing his clothes off.
    Hamster: (gasp!) "A man!"
    Max: "Heeelp!!!"
  • We don't see Max again until the end of the episode, when he and Berkley return home:
    Muggle: "So what happened? Did Max find another hamster?"
    Berkley: "Uh... you could say that."
    (Max walks in with a dazed smile on his face and a hamster on his arm, all Covered in Kisses)
    Max: "Hi Muggle. What can I say? I fought 'em as long as I could."
    Muggle: "Guess what? They caught Jammet's hamster last night, so I guess we don't need yours."
    Max: "That's cool. I wasn't going to give her to you anyway."
• Endearingly Dorky: His fish-out-of-water dorkiness is always used to highlight just how adorable he is. It's very common for other characters to notice and comment on his innocence and how it reflects on his person compared to most everyone else, who all tend to be extremely cynical. The consensus? He's a good kid.
• First Love: His first love was Miko, a Japanese mouse who he rescued from President Cat. He didn't end up with her because he felt that he'd be imposing himself upon her family.
• The Heart: An exaggerated example - he's the only member of the regular cast who is a genuinely gentle soul. He is consistently willing put his own needs on the side in favor of someone else, no matter how inconvenient it would be to do so.
• Heartwarming Orphan: His whole family is killed in the first episode. He spends the rest of the show trying to make life better for others.
• Innocence Lost: A downplayed example. He lost his entire family and lives in a Wretched Hive, but he still retains a generally idealistic outlook. That said, barely ten episodes pass before he's nowhere near as innocent as he once was.
• Mighty Whitey and Mellow Yellow: His relationship with Miko is a twist on this trope. Max is a soft-hearted Actual Pacifist and fish out of water who was provoked to violence when President Cat tried to kill Miko, and ended up falling in love with her as a result.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Max loves everyone and hates all violence. In A Little Romance, when he saw President Cat preparing to kill a girl mouse, he hit him on the head with a light fixture, nearly killing him. Max spent the rest of the episode having an extended emotional breakdown over the event.
• Naïve Newcomer: Being from a quaint farm in Nebraska, he has very little knowledge of how things work in the Capitol on any level.
• Nice Guy: Everyone he meets knows he's a nice guy at heart... to a fault. He's always understanding, always willing to see another point of view, and often blindsided when he encounters cynical situations.
• Nice Mice: He's a mouse, and he's a genuinely good person.
• Only Sane Man: His entire adoptive "family" in the Capitol is an assortment of maladjusted reprobates that live under the floorboards.
• Past Experience Nightmare: He is clearly haunted by the death of his family. After they died, he didn't sleep at all for two days, and the first dream he had was a nightmare reliving the experience.
• Sensitive Guy and Manly Man: He's usually the sensitive guy to Jammet's manly man. However, thanks to Jammet not being as mean as he seems, and Max occasionally being pretty badass, the situation can be reversed.
• Tender Tears: He cries more readily than the rest of the cast specifically because he is such a gentle soul.
• Too Good for This Sinful Earth: Subverted, he nearly died twice (first from smoke inhalation, second time from drug overdose) but survived both times.
• Wide-Eyed Idealist: He really doesn't understand how the Capitol works, and tends to run off on idealistic crusades when he thinks someone has been wronged.

Jammet:

Voiced by: Charlie Adler

An uncouth, overweight rat who lives in the White House and finds himself with Max foisted upon him as a roommate. He is rude and crude but has Hidden Depths and is quite protective of his friends, despite often selfishly exploiting them and unthinkingly mistreating them.

• Butt-Monkey: Almost everyone in the show gets beat up, or horribly embarrassed more than once. Jammet tends to get it more. Much more.
• Comedic Sociopath: He is amazingly greedy and destructively selfish, to the point that he ends up wrecking just about everything on a comically grand scale every few episodes. As an example, during a power outage, he gained control of a working circuit and started rationing power to everyone based entirely on how much people could give him for it, thus unintentionally creating a dictatorship, a riot, and a revolution in just a few days.
• Deadpan Snarker: He's always got something to say, and it's often bitingly acerbic.
  Max: "Jammet, we worked it out already! When they use two bats, they only get two strikes!"
  Jammet: "Oh, thanks for telling me. Who you got batting cleanup - an octopus?!"
• Did Not Get the Girl: He fell in love with Violet the literal instant that he laid eyes on her. She loved him right back, but she eventually decided that she's not cut out for life outside of a cage.
• Disappeared Dad: His father is never seen, and Trixie says in one episode that she does not know his whereabouts.
• Fat Bastard: He's fat, and he's a bastard.
• Greed: His biggest motivators are usually food, sex, and easy wealth.
• Head-Tiltingly Kinky: He has... unique interests. As revealed in this exchange with Max:
  Max: "Nazi milkmaids in Acapulco? What kind of book is this anyway?"
  Jammet: "Travel guide. I got a whole collection."
• Hair-Trigger Temper: Angry tends to be his default mood, and just about anything anyone says or does can easily make him angrier.
• Heel Realization: He has a particularly heart-wrenching one in "Opie's Choice," when he sees what Opie's home life has become like since he got him addicted to Pep-Ups.
• Jerkass: Don't go counting on him to be a shining example of morality. He's a short-sighted, avaricious and racially-bigoted jerk with a serious mean streak.
• Interspecies Romance: He fell in love with Violet, who is a hamster.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: He is cynical, uncouth, disrespectful, and downright unpleasant. Deep down though, he doesn't want to harm anyone. He looks out for himself because that's how he learned to live in the world, and any time it's revealed that he's making life difficult for someone else, he immediately changes for his conscience's sake, even going so far as to make restitution for the damage he's done.
• The Leader: For better or worse, he's the one who leads the rats on kitchen raids to secure food, and considering the dangers of the job, he has a great track record.
• Love Cannot Overcome: His relationship with Violet started out incredibly well, but ended when a close encounter with President Cat convinced her that a pet like herself wouldn't be able to live safely outside of a cage. He took it pretty hard.
• Nominal Hero: Jammet is a skilled and clever leader that can command his team of rats to get just about anything done. That said, his actual motivations for doing anything good tend to be extremely selfish. More often than not, his carelessness and greed will create a self-feeding ambition that he will take to great extremes, with disastrous results. In his moments of self-awareness, he leans more towards Unscrupulous Hero - he's still repugnant and underhanded, but his motivation isn't just himself anymore.
• Politically Incorrect Hero: While none of the rats are particularly fond of the roaches, particularly at the beginning, Jammet is by far the cruelest and most outspoken about his bigotry towards them.
• Sensitive Guy and Manly Man: He usually acts as the Manly Man to Max's Sensitive Guy, though the situation can be reversed.
• You Dirty Rat!: Played With. He's pretty unpleasant a lot of the time, but he has enough moments to show he's not that bad of a kid deep down, most notably his grief towards Felix's death and his genuine love for Violet.

Berkeley:

Voiced by: Jennifer Darling

Max's cousin and (apparently) only living relative. She's an extremely opinionated social activist.

• Deadpan Snarker: She's easily as sarcastic as Jammet.
• The Heart: She's far more emotionally sensitive than everyone except Max.
• Jade-Colored Glasses: She's been protesting for a long time, and has been ignored for just as long. As a result, she has a markedly cynical attitude towards the world. She tends to call everyone she disagrees with a "fascist".
• Meaningful Name: She's a Soapbox Sadie and a hippie who dresses like one, and her name is derived from the University of California, Berkeley, which is often stereotyped for a far-left activist culture.
• New-Age Retro Hippie: Just look at what she wears - she's always wearing a peace symbol and a headband.
• Soapbox Sadie: This trope is her defining characteristic. She will protest from the rooftops against every injustice, even when the only persons affected are human and thus cannot even notice her.

Muggle:

Voiced by: Bobcat Goldthwait

A former lab rat with big glasses and male-pattern baldness, always seen in a gaudy Hawaiian shirt. He's Max's main friend other than Jammet, and has a tendency to randomly explode due to the experiments that were done on him.

• Absent-Minded Professor: He's brilliant. He also tends to completely miss things any sane person would instantly recognize, like the fact that he just walked into a raging fire.
• Cloud Cuckoolander: Putting it lightly, he's a loon. He tends to ramble on about random facts that only barely have any connection to what anyone is currently doing, walk into deadly situations without batting an eye, and generally puts off everyone around him.
• Disney Death: He has a tendency to survive things that should have killed him.
  • In "Max Goes To Washington", he is seemingly gassed to the death by exterminators. This triggers a Heroic BSoD in Max and causes him to run away, but it turns out that Muggle was merely unconscious and wakes up just after Max leaves.
  • In The Lady Doth Protest to Munch, he falls into a flaming can after casually walking off of a building. He walks out of it just as casually, none the worse for wear.
• Ditzy Genius: Crazy as he is, he's not an idiot. He's a walking encyclopedia as well as an adept engineer, artist, and chemist.
• Hidden Depths: In The KiloWatts Riots, he shuts himself inside his house and makes several dozen perfect mouse-scaled recreations of priceless works of art... as a side project to building a functional power supply, all in less than a week.
  Berkley: "Muggle, uh, did you paint these?"
  Muggle: "I just wanted to throw something up until I picked out my wallpaper!"
• Made of Iron: He can survive exploding on a periodic basis, falling into open fires, getting crushed by incredibly heavy objects, and so on. He hardly notices any of it.
  " You know, if I had a central nervous system, this would really hurt."
• The Medic: His extensive knowledge extends to medical expertise.
• No Indoor Voice: He only talks loudly.
• Nice Guy: One of the nicest characters on the show. In "Of Thee I Sting", he takes Max to the Lincoln Memorial to help restore his faith in politicians.
• The Smart Guy: Compared to the rest of the cast, he's an absolute genius. He can create a source of power that runs on mere drops of water.

Trixie:

Voiced by: Patti Deutsch

Jammet's mother and the unofficial matriarch of the White House's rodent population. She is blunt and sarcastic, and doesn't hide the fact she prefers the polite, sweet, good-hearted Max over her gluttonous, cretinous son (but she still loves him).

• Classical Antihero: She's a self-doubting loser. However, the amount of pull she has with everyone and her motherly tendencies balance out some of her weaker attributes.
• Jewish Mother: She definitely fits the stereotype. She is always manipulating Jammet into doing something or other, and being very snarky about it the whole time. She's very open about the fact that she considers him a dissapointment.
• Parental Substitute: To Max in particular. She explicitly says in "A Little Romance" that she wants to help Max feel like part of a family again.
• Smoking Is Not Cool: She's a heavy smoker. It does nothing for her image.
• The Snark Knight: She's tired of the world and it's absurdity, and it shows. She hates her station in life, and makes no pretense about the fact that she's entirely to blame for her situation, and has more than a few biting things to say about her own self and her past behavior.
• Team Mom: She will reach out when she sees someone in emotional distress, and always has some rather wise advice in those moments. She's also the closest thing the rodents have to a unifying force, and is well respected by just about everyone. That said, she has no real control over anything.
• Why Are You Not My Son?: She openly laments that her actual son Jammet is not nearly as polite or well-behaved as Max.

Moze:

Voiced by: Dorian Harewood

A jive-talkin', hip and modern cockroach. He becomes fast friends with Max after rescuing him in the first episode, and is generally one of the nicer characters.

• Deadpan Snarker: He's not as extreme as Jammet or Berkley, but he can definitely be snarky.
• Interspecies Friendship: He's close friends with Max, who is a mouse.
• Nice Guy: He's totally cool with everyone, as long as they don't have any problem with him and don't cause any trouble. Just about the only person who can really make him angry is Jammet, and even then he's (reluctantly) willing to hang out with him and is quite slow to actually blow a fuse and start any violence. Other than that, he takes just about everything in stride and avoids confrontation when he can.
• Only Sane Man: Out of the main cast, he's the one with the most sense. He's not a Jerkass like Jammet by any means, and unlike Max he's also no Wide-Eyed Idealist who thinks the world can be fixed in a day. Instead, he lives his life stepping on a few toes as possible and having harmless fun with his friends.
• Super-Speed: He runs really really fast. He used this ability to save Max from poison gas in the first episode.

P. Cat:

Voiced by: Frank Welker

One of two villainous cats living in the White House. Presumably he's the First Pet of (then) President George George. His name comes from the fact his nametag simply says "P" (for "Presidential"). A brutish, violent beast who essentially becomes Jammet's arch-enemy.

• Ax-Crazy: With the exception of his fellow cat, he basically viciously attacks anyone and anything that gets near him, even humans.
• Determinator: Once he has his eyes on prey, they aren't safe until it is physically impossible for him to reach them. Anything less than that, and he'll pursue them either forever or until his target is dead.
• The Dreaded: He is portrayed more like a Lovecraftian horror of nature than an actual character, and everyone is terrified of him. After his injury (which leaves nearly his entire body in a cast), this trope seems to fade as everyone starts treating him like a joke... until he recovers, at which point it's revealed that he has a metal skullcap that makes him even more dangerous.
• Cats Are Mean: He's an absolutely vicious beast that kills or terrorizes anything and everything he encounters.
• We Can Rebuild Him: After Max almost kills him, he returns all bandaged up. Particularly his head. It's eventually revealed, when he heals, that the vet installed a metal skullcap in his head which allows him to smash through walls and doors by headbutting them, making him twice as dangerous.

V.P. Cat:

Voiced by: Frank Welker

The second of the two evil cats, although his heart isn't in it as much as his partner. He would appear to be (then) Vice President Dan Quayle's cat, and is consequently modeled after his owner.

• Butt-Monkey: Though he's never actually attacked, he's constantly bullied by President Cat.
• Cats Are Mean: Not at all - unlike President Cat, he has not one hurtful intention.
• Harmless Villain: Despite bluster and pretensions to being dangerous, he harms exactly no one throughout the series.
• Heel–Face Revolving Door: Goes from making an at least nominal attempt to catch the rodents in one episode, to restoring their electricity the next.
• Hidden Depths: He's very well spoken, highly intelligent, and quite friendly. However, he doesn't talk much at all.
  • He's also surprisingly knowledgeable about electricity repair, fixing the rodents' power outage and taking the time to explain to Max and Moze what to do next time.
• Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain: His attempts at villainy, or even seeming tough, are all pretty pathetic. So much so that it's easy to feel bad for him as he tries.
• Minion with an F in Evil: It's expected that he'd pursue and kill the rodents, but he can't being himself to do so. He eventually gives up entirely on trying to be evil, undergoing a Heel–Face Turn.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: He's modeled on (then) Vice President Dan Quayle.
• Suddenly Voiced: For almost the entire series, he, like the P. Cat, never speaks, except to growl, snarl and meow. Eventually though he begins speaking out of nowhere and is quite eloquent and intelligent. He spoke three times, but in An Embarrassment of Roaches, he spoke like Orson Welles.
• Vice President Who?: His entire existence is a parody of this trope. He's a totally ineffectual softie who can only make the weakest pretense of being a mean hunting machine like President Cat.

Opie:

Voiced by: Danny Goldman

A jittery, insane squirrel who is friends with Jammet. He suffers a severe drug addiction thanks to Jammet getting him hooked on caffeine pills called Pep-Ups, and Jammet is often quite mean to him until realizing just how badly he's ruined Opie's life.

• Addled Addict: Has a severe addiction to Pep-Ups. The longer he goes, the more bizarre, selfish, mean and insane he becomes, increasingly unable to function at home or in public.
• Cloud Cuckoo Lander: Although how much of it is due to his Pep-Up addiction and how much of it is due to his natural personality is up for debate. Among other things, he claims he's "building a DC-10 out back."
• Drugs Are Bad: His Very Special Episode is entirely devoted to this trope.
• Functional Addict: He starts out reasonably lucid, but goes downhill from there.
• Heel Realization: He starts realizing that he has a real problem when he almost leaves Max to die.
• Keet: Due to his addiction to Pep-Ups, he's balls-to-the-wall hyperactive, amazed and enthusiastic about literally everything, even his own screwups.

Felix the Rat:

Voiced by: Patric Zimmerman

Another friend of Jammet's, a fast-talking mouse. Like Opie, Jammet is often quite mean to him. He ends up being eaten by the P. Cat not long after he's introduced, making Jammet regret his harsh treatment of Felix and swear revenge.

• Butt-Monkey: Jammet can hardly tolerate his constant and annoying enthusiasm, and treats him like crap as a result. Despite this, Felix considers Jammet a close friend of his.
• Dead Hat Shot: His hat was the only thing left after President Cat was through with him.
• Keet: He's incredibly excited and hyperactive at all times.
• Killed Off for Real: He ends up as President Cat's lunch after one of Jammet's plans goes wrong. President Cat had Jammet and his crew trapped in a narrow walkway, with the only way out being to dash through a thicket of mouse traps. When Jammet decides to have everyone run through the traps, Felix gets his tail caught in one of them and was unable to free himself before getting eaten.
• Kill the Cutie
• Motor Mouth: He talks a mile a minute, often running sentences into each other. Max was openly bemused the moment he heard Felix talking.
  Max: "Felix. Just. Answer. Slowly."
• Punny Name: His name is a transparent pun on Felix the Cat. He directly points this out in his first scene.
  Felix: "I'm Felix! I know, Felix the rat, but after 300 kids, I was lucky mom and dad gave me a diaper, much less a name!"
• Sacrificial Lamb: He basically existed to die so that Jammet would develop his rivalry against President Cat.

Miko:

Voiced by: Janice Kawaye

A mouse from Japan who is the daughter of a visiting Japanese mouse official. Max becomes smitten with her.

• The Gadfly: She has a notably quirky and mischievous sense of humor.
  Miko: "Which one is your President?"
  Max: "Down there."
  Miko: "The one right below me!? What I wouldn't give for a water balloon..."
• Nice Mice: She's the friendliest character to appear in the show, even compared to Max.
• Rescue Romance: She fell in love with Max after he saved her from President Cat.
• Sacred First Kiss: This trope is subtly used at the end of A Little Romance. As she is about to depart with her family, she suddenly kisses Max right on the lips. Seeing his bemused reaction, she says:
  Miko: "Your first time? Me too."
• Women Prefer Strong Men: This trope is strongly implied by her reaction to Max killing President Cat.
  Max: "I... I killed him."
  Miko: "You were so brave!"
  Max: (faints)
• Yamato Nadeshiko: She fits the Japanese stereotype of a good housewife to a tee.

Violet:

Voiced by: Pamela Segall

A pampered, spoiled hamster who is the pet of a visiting human dignitary's daughter. Jammet falls in love with her and wants to free her so she can come live with him.

• All Girls Want Bad Boys: She instantly falls in love with Jammet: a shameless, greedy, uncouth, loudmouthed, bigoted, pervert. Granted, she's exactly the same.
• Big Beautiful Woman: She's well bigger than Jammet is, and is animated in a way that accentuates her girth. Jammet was utterly smitten with her the very instant he saw her.
  Jammet: "Look at her! She'll never go for a guy like me, she's way too beautiful..."
• Birds of a Feather: She and Jammet are extremely alike.
• Brooklyn Rage: She has a Brooklyn accent, a lot of pent up anger, and a wildly uncouth attitude.
• Jerkass: She's basically Jammet as a woman, with all that implies.
• Interspecies Romance: She's in love with Jammet, who is a rat.
• Love Cannot Overcome: After a close call with President Cat, she leaves Jammet, convinced that her pampered life in a cage has left her unable to survive on the outside.
  Violet: "I'm built for comfort, Jammet, not speed. I almost got killed last night... like about 50 times!"
• Stout Strength: In one scene, she was having a fit of laughter at Max's expense when she casually slapped Jammet on the back. She hit him with such force that he flew out of frame and hit the far wall with a resonating BANG.

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