Disney / Wreck-It Ralph

This page contains unmarked spoilers. You Have Been Warned!

When the game is over, a new world comes to life.

"It sure must be nice, being the good guy..."

— Ralph

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The 52^nd animated film from Disney's canon line-up, Wreck-It Ralph is about a villain living in the world of a 1980s 8-bit video game starring Fix-It Felix Jr. (Jack McBrayer) as one of the many machines in an arcade center. Ralph (John C. Reilly) is fed up with being disrespected as the bad guy for 30 years straight, so he sees an opportunity to become a hero within the sci-fi Light Gun Game Hero's Duty featuring Sergeant Calhoun (Jane Lynch). With his simple goal of winning a medal, he unwittingly brings a deadly enemy to another of the arcade's games, Racing Game Sugar Rush, where he meets a "glitch" named Vanellope Von Schweetz (Sarah Silverman) and tries to help her accomplish her goal of competing in a race. Meanwhile, Felix and Calhoun follow Ralph to Sugar Rush to fix the problems he's caused in both of their respective worlds.

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Directed by Rich Moore, who was a former director on The Simpsons and later on The Critic and Futurama. It was released on November 2, 2012. Watch the teaser trailer here, which was released during E3 2012. There's also a theatrical trailer and international trailer as well. The film is preceded by the animated short Paperman.

A sequel was officially announced at the end of June 2016; titled Ralph Breaks the Internet, it was released on November 21, 2018.

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Wreck-It Ralph provides examples of:

Tropes # to B

• 100% Heroism Rating: Felix, from those he rescues in his game (i.e. everyone). This doesn't help Ralph's self-esteem.
• Action Girl: Calhoun. By virtue of having "the most tragic backstory ever", Calhoun is the hardest, most intense, and most badass character in the arcade, let alone in her own game.
• Actor/Role Confusion: Every video game character seems to consider himself and his fellows to be Animated Actors who are off the clock once the lights go out. Except the villains, who are actors like them but are still treated as though they weren't. Seeing a "Bad Guy" is enough to send small-fry scurrying, and things are so bad that the villains have a support group.
• Actually Pretty Funny: King Candy puts on a pair of glasses, hoping Ralph wouldn't hit him. Ralph just grabs the glasses off of his face, and then breaks them over his head.
  King Candy: You hit a guy... with glasses. Heh heh, that's, that's well played.
• Adaptational Villainy: Zangief of Street Fighter is portrayed in the movie as a bad guy (or, at least, a Punch-Clock Villain). In the Street Fighter lore he's a decent guy — not exactly a hero, but an Unwitting Pawn at worst. He doesn't know about the World Domination plot that the tournament is supposed to cover for.
• Adult Fear:
  • So who wants to have their little sister figure lost in a National/Metaphysical Apocalypse Wow? Ralph certainly didn't, and King Candy preys on his fear to ensure at any cost that Vanellope doesn't race.
  • As with Toy Story 3, being considered obsolete and forced out of work despite being perfectly capable of doing your job is pretty scary.
• Advertised Extra: A few posters were made with actual video-game characters in the center (like these) when in the film their roles are at most extended cameos.
• An Aesop:
  • The Bad-Anon group gets it dead right from the beginning — "There's nobody I'd rather be than me."
  • Heroes come in all shapes and sizes.
  • For the kids — bullying is extremely uncool.
  • For the teenagers and young adults — a job is just a job; don't let it take over your life.
• Affectionate Nickname: An interesting example, in that for Ralph and Vanellope, names like Major Body Odor and President Fart-Feathers become affectionate rather than insulting.
• Agony of the Feet: On Vanellope's first attempt at driving her brand-new car, she bumps into Ralph's foot, who gets to hop for a bit. Moments later, she knocks some Mentos into Diet Cola Hot Springs, and the spatter singes his feet, making him hop around some more.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: In an odd inversion, the Cy-Bugs, who, thanks to their simple, mindless, animalistic programming, are incredibly dangerous if they're let out of Hero's Duty. While every other NPC is, at the very least, self-aware and follows the game's parameters, the bugs do not — they are only kept in check by the beacon in Hero's Duty, which recalls and destroys them when the game isn't being played. If they ever escaped, they would never stop consuming and multiplying. Because of this, Calhoun likens them to a computer virus.
• Ain't Too Proud to Beg: When Ralph is about to destroy Vanellope's car, she implores him to stop.
• The Alcoholic: Gene is frequently seen with a martini in his hand, and his floor/room of the building cake is rum cake.
• Alien Blood: Zombie oozes purplish-black goo when Kano performs his Fatality, since for obvious ratings reasons, they couldn't have it be red.
• The Alleged Car: Vanellope's first car, dubbed the Lickety-Split, isn't much to look at, doesn't even have an engine, and is entirely pedal-powered. It's unlikely it would have ever offered any serious competition in the race, and it is destroyed very easily by the other Sugar Rush racers... who finish the job for her. This foreshadows why she is forbidden to race. She doesn't need to offer serious competition; she just needs to finish, so even a pedal-powered car is a threat to King Candy.
• Alliterative Name:
  • Wreck-It Ralph, Fix-It Felix, King Candy, Vanellope von Schweetz.
  • There's also the Random Roster Race.
• All of the Other Reindeer:
  • Ralph is treated like this by the Nicelanders in his own game, but he at least gets treated with respect by the other villains in the arcade.
  • The characters in Sugar Rush mercilessly bully Vanellope and keep her from participating in the races because she's a glitch.
• The All-Solving Hammer: Felix's magic hammer, in the sense that it can fix anything he taps with it — including his own face after Calhoun punches him. It works against him in the Fungeon, though, causing the dilapidated window bars to get stronger when he hits them, and him to groan, "Why do I fix everything I touch?!"
• All There in the Manual: Hero's Duty has an extensive backstory and Calhoun at least has a fleshed-out character, but the actual game is just a rail-shooter killing bugs. The first time we meet a character from the game he's having a breakdown over this.
• All There in the Script: A large number of minor characters (and one major character) never have their names mentioned in the film itself:
  • Nicelanders Nolan (mustache and glasses), Roy (balding, gray hair, and suit with bowtie), and Meg ("Sweet mercy! Without Ralph, we're doomed!") aren't name-dropped, and several others aren't known to even have names at all.
  • A few of the palette swap Sugar Rush racers' names briefly appear on the Jumbotron but aren't mentioned in speech: Nougetsia Brumblestain, Citrusella Flugpucker, Torvald Batterbutter, and Sticky Wipplesnit.
  • Kohut and Markowski are the only Hero's Duty marines to be mentioned by name. Others with known (but unmentioned) names are Mac and Marco, revealed here.
  • Brad Scott (Calhoun's fiancé in her backstory) is not named in dialogue, given that he only appears in flashbacks and speaks exactly six words. Only his first name is given in the credits. However, there is an interactive Hero's Duty comic that sets up the plot of the game, featuring Brad in a prominent role.
  • And most conspicuously absent: Sergeant Calhoun's full name is Tamora Jean Calhoun. The film never mentions this; she doesn't even give her name to players in the introduction of Hero's Duty. Only the movie's website, art book, and some promotional art display cases at an "Art of Animation" exhibit at Disney's Hollywood Studios ever made this clear. She's only mentioned by name once in the entire movie, where Ralph simply refers to her as "Calhoun" towards the end of the epilogue (and the credits just give her last name as well). There were originally going to be more scenes taking place in Hero's Duty where she would've been properly introduced, but they were cut due to changes in the movie's plot during development.
• Alpha Bitch: While everyone bullies Vanellope, as mentioned above, Taffyta Muttonfudge is the one who leads them in it; no bullying is shown without her orchestrating it.
• Always Night: The world of Fix-It Felix Jr. is like this, as are most of the older games, by virtue of technological necessity. Hero's Duty seems to be this by design, being a scary Bug War sci-fi first-person shooter. Sugar Rush is an inversion, at least until the Cy-Bugs start attacking.
• Amazon Chaser: Felix falls for Calhoun immediately after she punches him and later calls her a "dynamite gal". Also, while Calhoun is a normal-sized woman in her own game (though a bit on the tall side), compared with Felix she might as well be a giant.
• Ambidextrous Sprite: Played straight with Felix in his own game, whose hammer changes arms when he changes direction, but averted with Ralph, whose single overall strap is always on his right side.
• Ambiguously Gay: Satan. ("It's pronounced Sah-teen").
• Ambiguously Jewish: The arcade owner, Mr. Litwak, has a very Jewish last name.
• American Kirby Is Hardcore: Most of the movie posters feature Ralph proudly flexing in front of a dark blue backdrop with various characters beside him depending on the poster. The Japanese poster◊ has a shocked Ralph and Vanellope racing on a track in Sugar Rush with a bright yellow backdrop, and is also the only poster to feature King Candy on it.
• Amusing Injuries:
  • Felix has Calhoun repeatedly injure him to attract some Laffy Taffy in Sugar Rush, fixing himself with his hammer after each hit.
  • Ralph gets his fair share during his Training Montage with Vanellope, such as her running over his foot.
  • Vanellope suffers one herself during the Training Montage. She eats the car's dashboard in a crash and loses a tooth. Cue a tooth-spit and big gap-tooth grin!
  • Ralph inadvertently kills Felix when he crashes the party. Fortunately, he can respawn, so no harm done. Killing the guest of honor is quite clearly a serious faux pas, though.
  • Markowski from Hero's Duty screaming like a little girl and knocking himself out running into a wall has to count!
  • Cyborg^note who is quite clearly really Kano ripping Cyril's... Zombie's heart out is treated like a big joke. Given how he's a zombie he probably doesn't really need it anyway.
• Ancestral Weapon: Or Ancestral Tool — in his backstory, Felix's magic fixing hammer was given to him by his father (remember, he's Felix Junior).
• And Show It to You: Kano rips out a zombie's heart during the Bad-Anon meeting, still beating, seemingly out of habit more than anything else. The zombie doesn't mind, though Ralph is put off by the mess.
• Animated Actors: All of the video game characters (except the Cy-Bugs) are self-aware and play their roles for the gamers. Ralph kickstarts the plot when he gets dissatisfied with his job and breaks character.
• Animesque: The Sugar Rush universe and its characters seem to take cues from "cutesy anime" templates. Its theme song is even a J-Pop number, sung by AKB48. The game itself is apparently a Japanese import.
• Annoying Younger Sibling: Vanellope acts like this around Ralph, complete with childish insults and hyperactive antics.
• Apocalypse How: Individual games are treated as the Regional version: a class 4 happens if a game is destroyed by viruses, and a regional class 6 happens if a game is unplugged. Sugar Rush narrowly averts a regional class 4, which would have escalated to a global class 4 had the Cy-Bugs spread to the rest of the arcade.
• Arc Symbol: The medals reflects/represents Ralph's desires and Character Development. The Hero's Duty medal he achieved through game-jumping represents his selfish need to be loved and respected, while the one given to him by Vanellope as an appreciation for helping her build a car represents his selfless devotion to his friend(s).
• Arc Words:
  • "Going Turbo." And before you ask, yes, the capital T is important.
  • "I'm bad, and that's good. I will never be good and that's not bad. There's no-one I'd rather be than me."
• Arm Cannon: As the first demonstration of their assimilation ability, a Cy-Bug that eats Ralph's rifle promptly morphs its forelimbs into rifles and chases after him.
• Armor-Piercing Question: After Ralph gets to see the Sugar Rush game cabinet from the outside, he learns something rather important. He later uses what he learned as a question to Sour Bill. When asked said question, Bill's only response is to try and run for it.
  Ralph: Hey cough drop! Explain something to me. If Vanellope was never meant to exist, then why is her picture on the side of the game console?
• Armor-Piercing Response: When Felix is talking about being in jail, Ralph gives one of these and it makes Felix realize exactly how wrong the treatment of Ralph has been.
  Felix: You don't know what it's like to be rejected and treated like a criminal!
  Ralph: Yes, I do. That's every day of my life.
• Artificial Stupidity: Spoofed with the PTSD-inflicted Hero's Duty soldier Markowski at Tapper's, who constantly walks head-on into a wall and repeats "We are humanity's last hope... our mission: destroy all Cy-Bugs," as if suffering from faulty routing and looping sound files.
• Art Shift: The ending credits have the main characters moving through various eras of video game animation, though for obvious reasons they don't bother with present-day. This also happens in the film proper when Ralph moves from Pac-Man back to Game Central Station, not to mention his own game in the beginning. Overall, all of the characters (except those from Hero's Duty) are much more realistic and better-defined in their "private lives" than on their own game-screens; in fact, Felix's adoration of Calhoun's "high definition" is somewhat puzzling, since he's not exactly 8-bit himself when he's off his own screen.
  
  However, there are some small details that differ between 8-bit and HD characters offscreen from their games. Even though both of them have 3D models, Felix has a fairly uniform color scheme and minimal shading, whereas Calhoun has a more realistic skin texture (even freckles, if you look closely) and her armor has dents/scratches in it, among other things. This distinction is lost when viewed from the credits, however, as everyone is depicted in 8-bit, 16-bit, or 3D-ish pixels throughout the sequence.
• Ascended Glitch: In-Universe, everyone wants to play as Vanellope in Sugar Rush because her glitch-teleportation helps her win.
• Aside Glance: King Candy gives a very quick one during his extremely exposition-filled speech before the roster race when he says the phrase, "This event is pay to play; we all know this."
• Assimilation Backfire:
  • The main villains include Cy-Bugs, which take on the features of whatever they eat. A Cy-Bug eats King Candy, who is assimilated a little too well and becomes said Cy-Bug's primary consciousness.
  • Also, the Cy-Bugs from Hero's Duty are metallic from eating the metal environment around them. When they are in Sugar Rush, they eat and become the candy from the game, making it easier for Ralph to simply smash them — the exception being those that ate jawbreakers and are subsequently even tougher than the metal ones.
• As You Know: When King Candy is explaining the rules of the Random Roster Race to the racers. Lampshaded in that he says, "we all know this," indicating he just says this as his spiel.
• Attention Whore: Turbo was the best racer in the most popular racing game in the arcade. When a new racing game steals attention from him, he gets extremely jealous and jumps into the new game just to crash it. Unfortunately, his antics gets both the new game and his own game unplugged. Ralph himself almost repeats Turbo's mistake, though Character Development allows him to avert it in the end.
• Audience Surrogate:
  • Not with a character but a setting. Sugar Rush, a mascot kart racer in Level Ate, is probably the easiest video game for anyone to understand and still remain unique to video games.
  • There is also Moppet Girl, who hops between arcade games when they become plot relevant.
• Award-Bait Song: "When Can I See You Again?" performed by Owl City. It's a bit more upbeat than most examples of the trope, but it's still got plenty of electronic synth, which is oddly fitting, considering the subject matter of the film.
• Awesome Moment of Crowning: Vanellope's return to her place as princess of Sugar Rush comes with Power Floats and a Transformation Sequence. She then defies it in favor of being president.
• Badass Adorable:
  • Felix. It probably helps that he's a Mario Expy. At one point during the punch and hammer gag, he takes on a close resemblance to Mario himself, and his death animation is oddly similar to Mario's death animation in Donkey Kong.
  • Ralph himself, especially once he starts softening towards Vanellope and effectively becomes her big brother.
  • Vanellope is certainly badass adorable as well. Ralph himself describes her as an "Adorable Winner", which is about as close to the phrase "Badass Adorable" as you can get without resorting to potty mouth.
    Vanellope: Ralph, what if the gamers don't like me?
    Ralph: Who doesn't love a brat with dirty hair?
  • Moppet Girl, when she takes hold of the gun controller for Hero's Duty.
• Badass and Child Duo: Ralph and Vanellope, though they're both pretty badass in their own ways, Ralph takes care of the heavy lifting and fighting. She's more of a schemer.
• Badass Driver: The Sugar Rush cast are all amazing drivers, given that they are racing game characters with fifteen years of practice. Turbo counts as well and for the same reason.
• Badass in Distress: Ralph has to save Vanellope and Felix from King Candy's Fungeon and then Vanellope saves Ralph from going through with his Heroic Sacrifice.
• Bad Is Good and Good Is Bad: The Bad-Anon Affirmation is, "I'm bad and that's good. I will never be good, and that's not bad. There's no one I'd rather be than me." It does double duty as a Badass Creed during the climax as an affirmation of what he is and what he does. Triple duty if you consider that Ralph meant them as his Famous Last Words.
• Barrier-Busting Blow: Ralph bursts through barriers several times, such as to free Felix and Vanellope. He was literally programmed to be a wrecking ball, so things like "solid walls" and "locked doors" are just momentary inconveniences to him.
• The Bartender: Appropriately enough, the one from the game Tapper plays this role for the video-game characters. Ralph goes to him for advice on his midlife crisis and medal seeking.
• Battle Couple: Calhoun and Felix given that both of them are heroes and undertake a Save the World mission together. The latter's even shown in the credits shooting Cy-Bugs with his wife.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Ralph brings his medal back to Fix-It Felix Jr. and Gene follows through with the deal to give up the key to the penthouse, but now no-one is there to hang out with Ralph. Their game has already been marked "out of order" and set to be unplugged because of Ralph's and Felix's absence, so all the Nicelanders evacuated.
  Ralph: I was just tired of living alone in the garbage!
  Gene: Well, now you can live alone in the penthouse.
• Being Evil Sucks: It can really suck to be a video game villain. Nobody appreciates the hard work you put into your villainy, you don't get any of the glory like the hero does, and in Ralph's case, he's constantly hoisted and pitched off the edge of a tall building when Felix saves the day, only to go home to the dump and sleep on a bed made of broken bricks he broke in the previous rounds.
• Berserk Button:
  • Don't call Ralph a bad guy, or bully someone by pushing her into the mud, as he is dropped into the mud every day.
  • Don't call Calhoun a "Dynamite Gal". It triggers a flashback of the time she was Widowed at the Wedding.
  • Smashing Vanellope's car will drive her to tears.
• Beyond the Impossible: Ralph, who smashes a jawbreaker when Vanellope is about to say that it's impossible.
  Vanellope: [as Ralph pounds way at a jawbreaker] What a moron. Hey genius, it's a jawbreaker! You're never gonna break—
  [Ralph breaks it in two]
  Vanellope: [briefly glitches] Huh.
• Be Yourself: Starts with Ralph being told this in the Bad-Annon meeting, "there is no one I would rather be than me".
• Big Applesauce:
  • The Pac-Manorail station in Pac-Man has tiling that makes it look exactly like a New York subway station.
  • Game Central Station itself, which is obviously a reference to New York's Grand Central (down to the iconic three-window façade).
• Big Bad: King Candy, a.k.a. Turbo. is infamous for crashing two games pre-narrative, which informs Ralph's plotline. He's also responsible for all the trouble in Sugar Rush, which informs Vanellope's plot line. He even turns into a Cy-bug, which ties him to Calhoun's plot line.
• Big-Bad Ensemble: The Cy-Bugs serve as secondary antagonists to King Candy's takeover.
• Big Brother Instinct: Ralph develops this towards Vanellope in every way; protects her from bullies, helps her build a kart, encourages her when she expresses doubt, etc.
• Big Damn Heroes: Just when Ralph accepts his fate to save the Sugar Rush world, Vanellope jumps the ramp in Crumbelina's borrowed racecar and catches him in mid-air.
• The Big Damn Kiss: Felix gives Calhoun a quick kiss on the cheek in the spur of the moment. She responds with this trope. Complete with hearts floating around them.
• Big Good: Sergeant Calhoun is presented in this way in her game's narrative. She is the leader of the squad sent to eradicate the Cy-bugs and directs the First-Person-Shooter (i.e. the player) through the game.
• The Big Race: Once the arcade closes for the night, the Sugar Rush characters stage special races that are meant to decide who will be tomorrow's avatars.
• Big Red Devil: One attends the Bad-Anon meeting.
  Saitine: It's Sah-tine.
• Big, Stupid Doodoo-Head: Most of Ralph and Vanellope's dialogue consists of a volley of childish insults. Eventually this morphs into a way of showing affection.
  Ralph: See you later, President Fart-Feathers.
  Vanellope: Au revoir, Admiral Underpants!
  Ralph: And... farewell, Baroness Boogerface!
  Vanellope: Goodbye, Major Body Odor!
• Black Blood: Unlike the liters of bright red blood from his source material, Kano ripping the zombie's heart out online sprays a few drops of purplish goo.
• Black Comedy: There's so much, it almost makes you forget it's a Disney movie at times. The fact that the director and some of the writers worked on The Simpsons, and Sarah Silverman and John C. Reilly are involved, may have something to do with that.
  • In Niceland, Ralph accidentally causes a piece of ceiling to fall on Felix and send him through his death animation, only for him to respawn immediately after.
    Felix: I'm okay! I'm okay. Fit as a fiddle!
  • When Ralph wrecks the race-track upon arriving in Sugar Rush, one of the candy-bodied audience members ends up chasing after its own head.
  • Sgt. Calhoun's flashbacks are played partly for laughs, considering she's been programmed with the most tragic backstory ever.
  • In the "Bad-Anon" meeting, Kano expresses his appreciation for Zombie's share by ripping out his heart! For Zombie, it's no big deal.
  • After Vanellope crosses the finish line and resets the game — thus returning her status as princess and letting everyone remember who she really is, what does she plan to do to the racers who were bullying her earlier? Execute them. Calhoun then remarks that "this place just got interesting" with a Psychotic Smirk on her face. Vanellope's just kidding, though.
  • Mr. Litwak has a couple of darkly comedic comments:
    Litwak: Looks like the game's gone cuckoo! Like my nana.
    [a few minutes later]
    Litwak: It might be time to put ol' Ralph and Felix out to pasture... like my nana.
• Bland-Name Product: The TurboTime machine's logo and coloring strongly resembles the 1980 arcade game Rally-X, and Turbo himself is a dead ringer for the tall, lanky driver on the side of the arcade cabinet.
• Blessed with Suck: Felix's special fixing powers were a gift from his dad and he normally loves them — except for the one occasion he wants to actually break something: Whacking prison bars with his hammer only makes them grow twice as strong and thick.
  Felix: Why do I fix everything I touch?!
• Blind Shoulder Toss: While rummaging inside Tapper's lost and found box, Ralph finds a Metal Gear exclamation point and tosses it over his shoulder.
• Blood-Splattered Wedding Dress: In the flashback to Calhoun's wedding, her fiancé is killed by a Cy-Bug. Her wedding dress including a minigun is what saves her.
• Bloody Hilarious: A very enthusiastic Kano gets carried away and performs his most famous fatality on Zombie at the Bad-Anon meeting in front of a horrified Ralph. Zombie himself doesn't seem to mind much.
• Blue Is Heroic: Played with. Fix-it Felix Jr., the Adorkable Nice Guy is dressed all in blue, in opposition to Ralph's red. In the Fix-It Felix game, they're The Hero and the Big Bad respectively. However, the story of the movie itself is about Ralph trying to move away from his role as a villain and trying to become a hero in his own right. Felix, on the other hand, moves to a Lancer role, but without losing any of his heroic traits.
• Blue with Shock: Clyde reacts like this when Ralph expresses how tired he is of being the bad guy and everyone fears he's thinking of going Turbo. This is, of course, what happens to the ghosts in Pac-Man whenever Pac-Man picks up a power pill and starts hunting them.
• Blunt "Yes":
  M. Bison: You're not "Going Turbo" are you?
  Ralph: What!? No! Is it Turbo to want a friend? Or a medal? Or a piece of pie every once in a while? Is it Turbo to want more out of life?
  Zombie: Yes!
• Body Horror: Every single time a Cy-Bug eats since they become what they eat. Especially after eating King Candy during the climax. Now he truly looks like a freakish monster.
• Bonus Stage:
  • In the epilogue, Felix and Ralph let several homeless characters move into their game by setting up a bonus level where they assist in wrecking the apartments while Q*bert assists Felix in fixing it. Thanks to retro appeal, this makes the game even more popular.
  • As part of Street Fighter's cameo references, Ralph and Vanellope are also shown participating in its bonus level (helping Ryu smash the car).
  • Invoked when Vanellope says her hideout in Diet Cola Mountain is an unfinished bonus stage that got Dummied Out.
• Bookends:
  • The movie starts and ends with Ralph explaining about his game, scenes from that game, cakes for the 30^th Anniversary party, and him in the Bad-Guys Anonymous talking about taking it "one game at a time."
  • The movie itself. Starts off with the Walt Disney Animation Studios logo and Mickey Mouse rendered as 8-bit graphics (with a chiptune version of "Steamboat Willie"), and at the very end of the movie, after the credits, when the Disney logo shows up, the "movie" has a parody of the Pac-Man Kill Screen.
  • The film also begins and ends with the same beeping noise. In the beginning, the beeping comes from the Fix-It Felix Jr. cabinet in the first shot of the film, while at the end, it comes from the flashing "Press Start" message right before the Creative Closing Credits start.
  • When the Bad-Anon group says their Bad-Guy Mantra at the start ("I am Bad, and that's Good. I will never be Good, and that's not Bad. There's no-one I'd rather be than me"), Ralph doesn't join in, as he doesn't believe in the mantra's message. It's not until the very end, when he's willing to make his Heroic Sacrifice, that he finally recites the mantra, symbolizing the completion of his Character Development.
• Born as an Adult: Felix, Ralph, Calhoun, and all the adult characters if you believe that the moment their game is plugged in is their actual birthday.
• Borrowed Catchphrase: Felix impersonates Ralph's "I'm gonna wreck it!", but rather horribly.
• Boss Battle: Invoked by Cy-Bug/King Candy/Turbo during the film's climax ("Welcome to the boss level!"). It also helps that the top of Diet Cola Mountain is a large, round, flat venue — the typical shape of a Boss Room in most 3D games — with volcanic-red lighting.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: Revealed near the end to apply to the Sugar Rush characters, thanks to King Candy, who is actually Turbo in disguise, hacking into the system, locking away everyone's memories and turning Vanellope into a glitch.
• Bratty Half-Pint: Vanellope is introduced to Ralph and the audience as a child who asks annoying questions, insults ("Why are your hands so freakishly huge?) and copying everything he says. She's an oddly adorable one, at that.
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: Ralph looks through Tapper's lost and found box and finds a mushroom, an exclamation point (along with the sound), and Zangief's briefs.
• Break Her Heart to Save Her: Ralph destroys the car he helped make for Vanellope to keep her from racing, having been convinced by King Candy that her success could potentially have the game unplugged and kill her along with it.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall:
  • In an in-universe example, Ralph does this, in Hero's Duty when he grabs the robot that the player operates and yells his "When did video games become so violent and scary?!" line into its monitor... promptly causing the player to lose the game. Yep, there's a reason why the Fourth Wall exists in this realm. Calhoun even chews him out for it, stating that the first rule of the game is to not interfere with the player. The robot is also kinda pissed at Ralph.
  • During Ralph's My God, What Have I Done? moment in the penthouse, he throws his medal at the screen, causing one side of the "Out of Order" sign on the other side of the screen to come unstuck.
  • The closest to a genuine instance of this trope is a subversion: at the start of the movie and the ending, Ralph seems to address the audience as he narrates the current state of his life. At the end of the first narration and the start of the last one, it's shown he's actually telling his story in the Bad-Anon group.
• Break the Cutie: Vanellope gets this in spades, due to the other racers rejecting her because of her nature. See also Break Her Heart to Save Her above.
• Break-Up/Make-Up Scenario: Because of Break Her Heart to Save Her above. After Ralph finds out that King Candy was lying, he gets Felix to fix her kart that he smashed, gives it back, apologizes, and helps her win the race.
• Brick Joke:
  • During the anniversary party, Ralph asks what flavor was used for his part of the cake (the mud puddle). Much to his dismay, it turns out to be chocolate, which he hates. During his time in Sugar Rush, he falls into an actual pond of chocolate. Even later, after Vanellope saves him in the climax and they wind up in another pond after escaping the volcano; only this time he's more than happy to land in it, commenting "I love chocolate!". Then one final time in the Creative Closing Credits sequence.
  • During the hunt for Ralph, Calhoun mentions she'll slap Ralph for bringing a Cy-Bug outside of her game. Sure enough, that's exactly what she does.
  • When we first encounter the Surge Protector, Ralph is smuggling cherries back from Pac-Man. In The Stinger, Ralph can be seen carrying cherries again at the bottom of the Pac-Manesque Kill Screen.
  • Part of Calhoun's most tragic backstory ever involves her wedding being interrupted by a Cy-Bug, which came through the window and ate her fiancé. At her wedding with Felix, which takes place in the same chapel, all of the soldiers present are aiming their laser sights at that window.
  • Double-striped candy canes disappear when touched. Unfortunately for Calhoun and Felix, nobody told them that.
  • When Ralph gets Markowski to tell him about the medals in Hero's Duty, he says "Oooh!" twice in an identical tone — when he climbs to the top of the tower and sees the medal for himself, he says "Oooh!" a third time in exactly the same way.
  • Ralph struggles to break a presumably unbreakable Jaw Breaker. Later, Calhoun's bullets bounce off a Jaw Breaker-headed Cy-Bug.
  • Ralph leaves Sour Bill stuck to a lollipop. After the Sugar Apocalypse has been reverted and Vanellope has been reinstated as the rightful ruler of Sugar Rush, Sour Bill is there to play herald, even though he's still stuck to the lollipop.
  • When Ralph and Vanellope bid their farewells, Ralph cheers her up by giving a nod to her previous "Hero's Doody" jokes:
    Ralph: And besides, I've got a job to do too. May not be as fancy as being president, but it's my duty. And it's a big duty!
    [Vanellope chuckles]
  • Remember the cheat sheet King Candy used to get into the Sugar Rush programming? It's there on the table at Tapper's in the closing sequence.
  • A subtle one: When the arcade opens, a sign next to the door reads "No outside food or drinks allowed in arcade". A couple scenes later, we see one of the guys playing Sugar Rush has a cup from Subway.
  • All of the bricks in Ralph's dump are used to build homes for Ralph and the homeless characters in the end.
• Bright Is Not Good: While on the surface Sugar Rush's characters appear to be sickly sweet and nice, the irony is that pretty much every single inhabitant of the game is a horrible individual. In truth, they were originally just as nice as they appeared, but King Candy, who is in reality Turbo in disguise, intentionally messed up Sugar Rush's programming code so none of the racers would remember who Vanellope von Schweetz really was. The second they get their memories back, light does in fact become good and they instantly apologize for how mean they were. "Candy-coated heart of darkness", as Ralph puts it.
• Bring My Brown Pants: Calhoun says that if any soldier feels like they are going to wet themselves in battle, they should just keep it to themselves.
• Broken Bird: Sergeant Calhoun. Her initially cold personality is the result of losing her fiancé on their wedding day.
• Bug War: The main conflict in Hero's Duty is a squad of Space Marines fighting giant alien bug creatures to stop them from eating all intelligent life in the universe.
• Bullet Time: Vanellope enters this when she mentally works out how to use her glitch to her advantage, before being crushed between Turbo's car bumper and a cave column.
• Bully Hunter: Even though Vanellope had just stolen his medal, Ralph can't stand to see the other racers picking on her and scares them off. The thing that sets him off is seeing her pushed into a chocolate mud puddle, a situation he can relate to.
• Butt-Monkey:
  • Ralph and Vanellope are both a pariah in their own games. Felix is this outside of his game because of more comical mishaps.
  • Moppet Girl spends eight quarters to play Hero's Duty only for Ralph to cause her to lose early on, two gamer geeks playing Sugar Rush intend to be at the cabinets all day and don't give her a turn, and she plays Fix-It Felix Jr. when Ralph is missing from the game. At least she got a refund for the last one, and is also the first player we see racing with the restored Vanellope in Sugar Rush.

Tropes C to D

• Cain and Abel: Subverted and then inverted. Ralph is clearly jealous of Felix being the favorite, but neither have ill feelings or are hostile towards one another. Felix eventually starts calling Ralph "brother" towards the end of the film but this is after they have become great friends.
• The Cameo:
  • Ralph's villain support group consists of Clyde, Kano, Neff, Bowser, Dr. Ivo "Eggman" Robotnik, Zangief and M. Bison, a yellow cyborg, Mishaela, and a zombie from House of the Dead.
  • On an added level, Ryu, Ken, and M. Bison's respective voice actors are Kyle Hebert, Reuben Langdon, and Gerald C. Rivers, who voiced the characters in Street Fighter IV and Street Fighter X Tekken.
  • Q*bert appears in the movie, and is the one to tell Felix where Ralph went. He also appears in the Game Central Station with numerous other characters from his game, sadly homeless. They eventually make it back into a certain someone's game.
  • Also in the station are Chun-Li and Cammy, a knight on an ostrich, the Paperboy from... well, Paperboy. and the Paddles and Ball from Pong.
  • Sonic himself appears in a Public Service Announcement at the station, telling everyone to be careful not to die in a game that's not their own, or else they won't regenerate afterwards. He's also visible in a few more places: dancing at Felix's party, seen walking around Game Central Station in two separate scenes (in background shots), Ralph crashes an escape pod into him (causing him to lose some of his gold rings), as a picture on the celebrity wall at Tapper's, seated on Felix's side of the aisle in the chapel at Calhoun & Felix's wedding, and a short sprite-animated scene as part of the end credits. Sonic is voiced by Roger Craig Smith, who has voiced him in the games since 2010. Additionally, many of the movie's dubs into other languages (including Dutch, German, French and Spanish) use Sonic's voice from the cartoons, as the games never received dubs until Sonic Generations.
  • The Celebrity Wall has several others, including Miles "Tails" Prower, Space Invaders, and others.
  • And outside the game cameos, Tiny, the Tyrannosaurus rex from Meet the Robinsons, makes a background appearance in Game Central Station. Some speculate he represents Sauron from Primal Rage.
  • Add Frogger, Dig Dug, and Tapper to the list.
  • The machines in the arcade, among the ones already listed, include Space Invaders, Defender, Dance Dance Revolution, BurgerTime, and even Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
  • The game that triggers the main villain's descent into villainy is RoadBlasters.
  • Skrillex plays a DJ, and contributed to the music.
  • The security guard at the Sugar Rush bake-a-kart factory is Beard Papa.
  • Outside of the visual cameos, some of the sounds and voice actors are cameos themselves. John DiMaggio for instance has a cameo (as Beard Papa).
  • Written on the subway walls (may be difficult to spot):
    • "Sheng Long was here."
    • "Aerith Lives"
    • "All Your Base Are Belong to Us."
  • There are several blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameos, such as the Qix swirling around the laser display at the 30^th anniversary party, and the three Pac-Man ghosts other than Clyde chilling in Game Central Station.
  • In one quick shot in the terminal, you can see the dragon from Coryoon.
• Camera Abuse: In-universe, no less. The camera robot in Hero's Duty is used by Ralph to shield himself against one of the Cy-Bugs when it lunges at him. It collides with the camera, which breaks the video screen, and causes the game to end. The sentient robot gets pissed off at Ralph for doing this.
• Cannot Spit It Out: Several times the people in Ralph's video game ask him what is wrong, but Ralph can't vocalize that he feels disrespected.
• Cardiovascular Love:
  • Hearts appear around Felix and Calhoun when they kiss, courtesy of long vines of Laffy Taffy.
  • They also bloom in thin air around the couple when they share The Big Damn Kiss of victory at the end.
• Casting Gag: Kōichi Yamadera voices Ralph in the Japanese dub. Ralph is basically a human Donkey Kong, and Yamadera voiced Donkey Kong in the Japanese dub of the Donkey Kong Country animated series.
• Catch-22 Dilemma: Sugar Rush Speedway invokes this trope. The nine racers who will be on next day's roster are decided by a race held after the arcade closes, and the entrance fee is a coin; those who don't place in the top 9 don't get on the roster, thus can't earn any coins that day, so if they use the last of their coins to enter the qualifying race and don't place, they can never again be on the roster and thus can't ever get any more coins. This is done to keep Vanellope, supposedly a glitch, from racing, though why it hasn't yet caught any of the others is not explained. However since King Candy/Turbo does have access to the game's code and has proven he can alter character inventories, he probably can make sure that all of the other racers always have enough coins to enter.
• Catchphrase:
  • Ralph: "I'm gonna wreck it!"
  • Felix: "I can fix it!"
  • King Candy: "Have some candy!"
  • Turbo: "Turbo-tastic!"
• Caught on the Jumbotron: King Candy's attempts to destroy Vanellope's kart during the Random Roster Race, as well as Vanellope glitching him to expose himself as Turbo.
• Central Theme: The choice to be a better person always resides in the individual.
• Change the Uncomfortable Subject: Felix attempts this twice during the party scene. It doesn't work the second time.
• Character Title: Wreck-It Ralph. Averted with the Japanese title, which is simply Sugar Rush.
• Chekhov's Boomerang:
  • Sgt. Calhoun mentions during Hero's Duty that the Cy-Bugs become what they eat. One of them eats Ralph's gun and then makes it part of its body, using the gun against him. In the climax, King Candy gets eaten by a Cy-Bug, causing the Cy-Bug to become him.
  • Sgt. Calhoun mentions that the Cy-Bugs can be destroyed by a beacon of light just like back in Hero's Duty, which prompts Ralph to replicate the beacon by knocking a bunch of Mentos into Diet Cola Mountain's interior. The beacon lures the Cy-bugs and the Turbo/Cy-Bug hybrid into the beacon, where they are destroyed.
  • The Diet Cola and Mentos volcano in Vanellope's hideout is fired repeatedly: it is used to illustrate the danger of Vanellope's glitch, used to clean up all the Cy-Bugs, and used to force Turbo to his permanent Karmic Death, once he has combined with a Cy-Bug he is forced into it. The unfinished ramp spanning it is then used by Vanellope to save Ralph.
  • The Hero's Duty medal is used to establish game jumping, enter Vanellope into the race, persuade Ralph to believe King Candy's story, and knock down the out-of-order sign to reveal Vanellope's true nature.
• Chekhov's Gag:
  • When Vanellope comes into physical contact with other characters while glitching, the other will glitch as well. While seemingly just random the first time it appears, this ends up being useful to unmask Turbo by causing his King Candy skin to glitch.
  • Multiple characters comment on Ralph's bad breath which eventually comes in handy towards making Sour Bill fess up about King Candy's plan.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Turbo is mentioned early on as a backstory element.
  • The cy-bugs; when Ralph climbs into the central beacon and gets into an escape pod, the pod containing Ralph and the Cy-bug lands in a swamp in Sugar Rush, where the Cy-bugs start breeding and multiplying, emerging as a swarming infestation that threatens to destroy Sugar Rush. It takes a heroic effort from Ralph to knock the Mentos into the Diet Cola Mountain's interior and create a beacon to destroy the Cy-Bugs.
• Chekhov's Skill:
  • Ralph's ability to break things and Felix's ability to fix things near instantaneously keeps cropping up. Parodied when Felix tries to mimic Ralph and break himself out of prison. With his magic hammer. It goes just as well as you'd expect. Ralph busts him out moments later. A noteworthy pair of examples of Ralph's Chekhov's Skill not working as previously shown are when he wrecks the Kart and the stack of Mentos in the mountain.
  • Vanellope's glitching. It gives her a neat Teleport Spam and helps reveal who King Candy really is.
  • King Candy's ability to enter the "operating system" turns out to be more than just a plot convenience for retrieving the Medal.
• Chekhov's Volcano: Diet Cola Mountain's Mentos stalactites are what defeat the Cy-Bugs in the end.
• Chromatic Arrangement: Ralph, Vanellope and Felix wear red, green and blue respectively. Calhoun also counts as yellow because of her hair, and the fireworks at the end.
• Church of Saint Genericus: The church Calhoun almost gets married in as part of the most tragic backstory ever is just specific enough to be identified as a church of something and no more. The same church where she marries Fix-It Felix in the end.
• Classical Anti-Hero: Ralph is the hero of the movie. He's also a loser.
• Classic Cheat Code: King Candy uses the Konami Code (entered through a Nintendo Entertainment System controller, no less) to access the source code for Sugar Rush.
• Closed Circle: Most of the plot takes place in Sugar Rush because Vanellope, being a glitch, is unable to leave her game.
• Color-Coded Characters:
  • Ralph = Red and Brown
  • Felix = Blue
  • Vanellope = Green and Pink
  • Calhoun = Yellow and Black
  • King Candy = Purple^note As Turbo, it's Red and White.
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience:
  • According to the film makers, the characters colored venomous green are the ones who are truly evil. Note that Ralph is entirely green during his Hulk-like rampage through the stands. They were going to color Vanellope that way to signify her glitch status until they figured it made her look like a zombie. You can see what she would have looked like with green skin on the sign in the bakery forbidding glitches from entry.
  • Ralph and Felix themselves may count. Felix is dressed in mostly blue, the color for peace and serenity, while Ralph is dressed in mostly red, the color for intensity and anger.
  • Also, whenever Vanellope glitches, she turns shades of blue. However, Turbo turns shades of red when he is forced to glitch out.
• Commonality Connection:
  • Though he is initially angry that she stole and lost his medal (which he himself "earned" in dubious circumstances at best), Ralph eventually decides to help Vanellope not just because it's the only way to get the medal back, but because her situation is similar to his but even worse — from living in the dump, ostracized by others, to seeing the medal as their means of finally getting their due — and they bond over their shared dreams.
  • It's subtle, but Calhoun first agrees to let Felix come along after he says that it's his duty to fix what Ralph wrecks — something she would definitely understand.
• Constantly Curious: Vanellope when she first meets Ralph.
  Vanellope: Why are your hands so freakishly huge?
  Vanellope: Are you a hobo?
• Contralto of Danger: The tough-as-nails Space Marine Sergeant Calhoun has the lowest female voice (she is voiced by Jane Lynch) and is by far the most overtly badass character in the movie.
• Contrived Coincidence:
  • It's a good thing Markowski mentioned earning medals in Hero's Duty in front of Ralph.
  • It's also a good thing that Calhoun stated that without a beacon there would be no way to fend off the swarm of Cy-Bugs that had invaded Sugar Rush, which gives Ralph an idea...
  • It's a not-so-good thing that Felix called Calhoun a "dynamite gal", not knowing that is a Trauma Button for her, as it was what her late fiance used to call her.
  • A double whammy of good things when Mr. Litwak didn't secure the tape on the "Out of Order" sign well enough and Ralph deciding to throw his medal against the screen in frustration, enough to knock the tape and the paper loose and revealing to Ralph Vanellope's portrait on the side of the Sugar Rush cabinet.
  • And it's fortunate that when Ralph is lifted high into the air by Cy-Bug King Candy, he's directly over Diet Cola Mountain rather than having flown any distance horizontally at all.
• Cool and Unusual Punishment: Ralph forces Sour Bill to speak of King Candy's real intentions by licking him and putting him in his mouth. Given that Ralph is trying to be a good guy, and Sour Bill is made of candy, this comes disturbingly close to Carnivore Confusion territory.
  Sour Bill: I SWEAR THAT'S ALL I KNOW! JUST PLEASE DON'T PUT ME BACK IN YOUR FILTHY MOUTH AGAIN!!!
• Covered in Gunge: This happens to Ralph quite a bit, especially in Sugar Rush (candy gunge, yes, but still). It's usually chocolate to boot, and he doesn't like chocolate.
• Cover Identity Anomaly: When Ralph first meets Vanellope, he pretends to be a resident of Sugar Rush, but she sees through this lie immediately because he clearly knows nothing about the world ("Doublestripe break, you doi!").
• Covers Always Lie: Some of the posters which feature well-known game characters. Yes they're in the movie but they're not the focus of it. Q*bert and the Yellow Ghost relay information, but Sonic and Zangief just give exposition. Eggman, M. Bison and that purple Rhino however are props.
• Cranium Chase: In the Sugar Rush Speedway game, some of Taffyta Muttonfudge's fans are anthropomorphic lollipops, and when Ralph accidentally trashes the stands, part of the damage he does is to knock off the head of one such fan, which goes rolling along the ground whilst the body frantically chases it.
• Crapsaccharine World: Sugar Rush. It looks like a bright and colorful candy dreamland, but its characters (especially the racers) are mean-spirited, its ruler King Candy is corrupt, and outcasts like Vanellope are treated like dirt. Ralph himself gets a pretty cold welcome when he first arrives. And with The Reveal, we learn that it is so much worse than that. Lampshaded when Calhoun actually calls the game a "saccharine-saturated nightmare", and Ralph calls it a "candy-coated heart of darkness". When the rightful ruler is restored, it returns to a proper Sugar Bowl.
• Crapsack World: Hero's Duty. Dark, gloomy, infested with Big Creepy-Crawlies that want to kill you.
• Crazy-Prepared: Calhoun had a very, very large auto-cannon hidden in the skirts of her wedding dress, just in case.
• Create Your Own Hero: Had King Candy not screwed with Vanellope's code, she would not have gained her glitching powers which would go on to make her a major factor to ruining his master plan in taking over the arcade. Whoops.
• Creative Closing Credits: Before the credits scroll, there is a sequence of the main cast playing through a multitude of games. This and the credits are represented in an evolving style, mirroring the evolution of games.
• Creator Cameo:
  • Co-writer Phil Johnston voices the Surge Protector.
  • Director Rich Moore (who directed a lot of episodes of The Simpsons and was the supervising director on the original run of Futurama) voices Sour Bill and Zangief.
  • Raymond S. Persi (an animator for The Simpsons as well as Neighbors from Hell and The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat) voices Gene and Cyril.
  • Josie Trinidad (story artist on Tangled) voices Jubileena.
  • Casting associate Cymbre Walk voices Crumbelina.
  • Tucker Gilmore (production assistant on Tangled) voices both the Sugar Rush announcer and Glen the Turtle.
  • Tim Mertens (editor for A Goofy Movie, Darkwing Duck, Tarzan, and The Ren & Stimpy Show) voices Brad.
  • Kevin Deters (writer of Brother Bear) voices Clyde.
  • Brian Kesinger (writer and storyboard artist of Winnie-the-Pooh) voices Kano.
  • Casting director Jamie Sparer Roberts voices Yuni.
• Crisis Catch And Carry: Ralph grabs Vanellope and carries her with him as he tries to escape Sugar Rush. The problem is, Vanellope is glitched and she can't leave the game, so as hard as Ralph tries, he can't take her to safety.
• Crossover Ship: In-universe example with Felix and Calhoun, who come from two different games.
• Cruel to Be Kind: Subverted with King Candy, played straight with Ralph. King Candy tells Ralph that Vanellope becoming a racer could lead to the game world being destroyed and Vanellope dying along with it, Ralph tries to convince her to drop out of competition. When she won't listen, Ralph feels forced to destroy her car and ends up devastating her. Only later does Ralph realize that King Candy is lying through his teeth. He doesn't care for Vanellope's safety one bit, he only prevents her from racing to prevent the others from finding out that she's the real ruler, not him.
• Crunchtastic: Turbo's Catch-Phrase, "Turbotastic!"
• Cry Cute: Vanellope starts crying when she discovers that Ralph has cut a deal with King Candy and doesn't want her racing anymore, then completely loses it when he smashes her kart. Ralph looks to barely be holding back waterworks himself.
• Cultural Translation: The Russian dub. Many of the jokes are replaced by something more relatable to former Soviet people, who missed much of the classic arcade era and are more familiar with console and PC games.
  • Due to the issues of portraying a Husky Russkie in a Russian dub, Zangief instead speaks like a stereotypical Georgean: brash and macho. It may also be an allusion to the real Zangief, an Ossetian wrestler.
  • Saitine, instead of complaining about pronunciation of his name, instead says...
    Saitine: Actually, I'm Diablo. The third. With a patch.
  • The "One game at a time" gives way to this brilliant joke:
    Clyde: You need to find a balance between life and games.
    Zangief: Hey. You can have many lives, but just one game!
  • Felix's "oh my land" swearing is replaced with a colorful variety of construction-related expressions (still timid), suggesting that Felix actually knows how to fix things and not just hit stuff with his hammer.
• Cursed with Awesome: Vanellope's glitching means she has a few basic visual shifts at times at the start, and she occasionally (accidentally) teleports into other objects, which almost causes a lot of damage to her home. She later learns how to utilize the shifting she does when distressed, turning it into a functional teleport. Even later, this is revealed to be seen as a Good Bad Bug by players, making her the most popular character.
• Curse of the Ancients: Felix seems physically incapable of swearing.
• Cute Machines: Larval Cy-bugs. Warning: trying to hug a baby Cy-bug may cause The End of the World as We Know It.
• Cyberpunk: Hero's Duty features a weird portmanteau of this trope and Raygun Gothic in visual aesthetics.
• Dangerous Device Disposal Debacle: Cy-Bugs are always recalled and vaporized between Hero's Duty game sessions so they don't cause any more trouble than they have to. When Ralph accidentally activates one and sends it flying into Sugar Rush, it sinks into liquid taffy and Ralph thinks that's the end of that; it's dead and not worth worrying about. However, he doesn't actually confirm that the bug is dead, and Calhoun calls him out on this after finding its nest, where it feasted on candy and laid loads of eggs, making enough bugs to destroy Sugar Rush in minutes.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Invoked, lampshaded, and parodied with Calhoun. According to one of her subordinates, "she was programmed with the most tragic backstory ever": her husband-to-be gets eaten on their wedding day because she forgot to do a perimeter check. She unloads, screaming in horror, with a minigun she happened to have tucked away under her wedding gown, fueling her hatred for the bugs. Later, Felix calls her "a dynamite gal", which sets off a blackly hilarious series of flashbacks of her to-be-fiancé calling her the same thing.
• Dark Is Evil: Turbo sticks out from the other game protagonists by being having a Undeathly Pallor, yellow eyes and rotten teeth. Sure enough, there's a reason this "protagonist's" name is used to describe a typically unthinkable act in the game universe.
• Dark Is Not Evil: True of certain members of Bad-Anon, and for a less literal use of "dark", a major theme of the movie.
  Zangief: Just because you are bad guy does not mean you are bad guy.
• Darkest Hour: Vanellope's dreams of being a full racer have been literally broken, while Fix-It Felix Jr. is set to be unplugged in a couple of hours. Then after Ralph returns, the Cy-Bugs are devastating Sugar Rush.
• Dark Reprise: The music that plays when the Sugar Rush characters bully Vanellope and destroy her kart is a darker version of the upbeat theme that plays during the roll-call for the race.
• Dead-End Room: The NesquikSand Pit looks like this — and is, unless one can figure out how to attract the Laffy Taffies.
• Deadpan Snarker:
  • Ralph definitely is one, in a world-weary sort of way.
  • Vanellope is Little Miss Snarker.
• Deal with the Devil: Ralph makes one of these with King Candy when he tells Ralph that Vanellope's glitchy nature would make players believe that the game is broken and they would stop playing it, with Vanellope dying along with the game once it's unplugged. When Vanellope gives him a cookie heart medal, Ralph tries to persuade her not to enter the race for her own good; Vanellope calls him out on this when she sees Ralph with the Hero's Duty medal after he promised to help her win the race in exchange for getting it back.
• Death Is Cheap: Any damage to characters in their games is reset quickly. However, character death is permanent if you die outside your own game. Sonic has a PSA explicitly warning you of that.
• Deconstructive Parody:
  • Of video games. Ralph and most of the other video game baddies are nice enough guys who are doing the jobs that no one else wants. After all, who would want a job where all you do is get beat up by The Hero?
  • The movie becomes a Reconstruction into modern gaming by the end. Ralph travels worlds, battles a conspiracy, makes several difficult moral decisions, battles an evil mastermind in a climactic showdown and even pre-meditates a Heroic Sacrifice in the name of saving the one he loves. It's a plot very much like many popular modern games, undertaken by a character inspired by classic gaming.
• Defied Trope:
  • The film's plot is a guy trying not to be a Punch-Clock Villain, or at least break his 0% Approval Rating.
  • Vanellope gets in Crumbelina's kart to save Ralph, who was going to commit a Heroic Sacrifice.
  • After Calhoun's fiancé was killed at their wedding, her troops make sure her later wedding with Felix is covered in that spot as well.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: Calhoun starts off cold, hard, and gruff. But after spending a little time with Felix, she (reluctantly) starts to soften up a little bit. After the movie's climax, she apparently softened up enough to marry Felix.
• Delayed Safety Feature: The spacecraft ejector seat only works after Ralph has already crash-landed.
• Department of Redundancy Department: Felix being interrogated upon entering Hero's Duty: "I'm Fix-It Felix Jr., ma'am, from the game Fix-It Felix Jr!"
• Description Cut: During Moppet Girl's session of Hero's Duty, we see Calhoun warn the player that the cy-bugs become what they eat. We then cut to a Cybug eating Ralph's gun and fashioning a pair of automatic miniguns that it proceeds to shoot at him with.
• Designated Villain: In-Universe, most of the bad guys are simply programmed to be bad when they're on-duty.
• Destination Defenestration: In 8-bit form, while on-duty in "wrecking mode", Ralph breaks open Gene's window and throws him out of it during game play.
• Destructive Savior: As well-meaning as his intentions may be, Ralph is just programmed to wreck things.
• Determinator: All of the main characters exhibit constant and often stubborn determination in accomplishing their goals — which is used by the story itself several times to show how much they have in common. Felix and Calhoun both show a totally unwavering dedication to getting their jobs done, which briefly causes them to argue when they first team up. Likewise, Ralph and Vanellope never give up on obtaining the thing they think will make their lives better, even when they know doing it is a terrible idea. On the villainous side, Turbo will stop at nothing to give himself the spotlight — no matter who he has to attack to do it. Even when his previous selfish attempt failed so utterly that it put him and dozens of others out of their homes, all he learns from the situation is to do it again but more sneakily.
• Deuteragonist: Vanellope. In fact, the Disney Wiki uses this word for her.
• Difficult, but Awesome: In-story, Vanellope's glitch is presented as a disability that seriously hampers her racing ability, but once she learns to control it, it becomes a very powerful special ability; this may be why, at the end, she becomes so popular with the players.
• Dimensional Traveler: All non-glitch characters can do this by "game-jumping", though they usually limit it to after-hours when the arcade is closed. Ralph actually starts out the film at the support group inside the Pac-Man Ghost House, his narration notwithstanding.
• Disaster Dominoes: When Vanellope and Ralph try to bake a kart, Ralph shoots a couple targets, meant to decorate the car. He ends up breaking one, which goes and knocks all the others and completely breaks the minigame. Surprisingly, they still manage to get a fully-functional car out of it, and a lot of trashed candy.
• Disney School of Acting and Mime: The film mostly plays this straight, but it also has a rare aversion of this with the Nicelanders, who are animated in a very stilted, mechanical style to emulate the movement of 8-Bit sprites in CGI form. Word of God says the effect was much harder to achieve than it looked, because the Disney animators had been so conditioned to always avoid using this style of movement in their animation.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • Vanellope von Schweetz's glitching is almost treated as some kind of physical disability similar to epilepsy or even Parkinson's Disease by the other racers. She even refers to herself as having "pixlexia". Also, the racers picking on her and eventually destroying the racecar she made is the equivalent of playground bullying in elementary school. The timing of when she "glitches" also is quite familiar to autistic people, whose autistic traits often come to the fore under the same circumstances that seem to trigger Vanellope's "glitching".
  • Before Taffyta and the other racers wreck Vanellope's cart, they tell her "You're an accident just waiting to happen", treating Vanellope as if she was an unwanted or unloved child.
  • The dialogue from the scene with the Laffy Taffy sounds like something from a bad S&M porno when taken out of context.
  • Ralph is constantly stopped and singled out for "random" security checks by the Surge Protector, even though he is doing nothing wrong (aside from smuggling contraband in the form of fruit, which said guard misses completely). When Ralph is dressed in a Hero's Duty uniform, the guard ignores him.
  • When Felix tells Calhoun about his last sight of Ralph, Felix's dialogue sounds more like it's coming from someone who failed to see the signs of a future suicide.
    Calhoun: So what's with this Wreck-It joker, huh? Why'd he go AWOL?
    Felix: I wish I knew, ma'am. He was acting all squirrely last night, going on about cake and medals, but I never thought he'd go Turbo.
• Don't Explain the Joke: When Ralph is arrested by King Candy:
  King Candy: And if I ever see you here again, Wreck-It Ralph, I'll lock you in my Fungeon!
  Ralph: "Fungeon"?
  King Candy: Fun-Dungeon. It's a play on words. Get it? [Ralph is confused] A play on... never mind!
• Donut Mess with a Cop: In Sugar Rush, all the non-racer characters are some form of sentient confectionery. This extends to King Candy's two police officers, who literally are donuts. Their names are Wynchell and Duncan, referencing two donut chains. For bonus points, Wynchell is a Long John, a type of donut more commonly found in the western US, where Duncan's has the most locations.
• Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male: Two straightforward cases and one invoking of the trope.
  • Played straight. Calhoun delivers several forceful helmet-bashes to "Private Markowski" (actually Ralph). He is wearing full Space Marine armor, so it's doubtful that the blows even sting, but it probably still wouldn't have gotten by the censors if a male sergeant were slapping around a female private. Additionally, she manages to belittle her subordinates by calling them "ladies" while herself being female.
  • Played straight again. Calhoun punches Ralph outright near the climax, after she realizes his selfishness has doomed the entire world of Sugar Rush.
    Ralph: Nice move, kid! Now let's win this thing with no more surprises—
    [sock!]
  • Invoked. Calhoun provides Felix with a solitary Get a Hold of Yourself, Man! slap while they are stuck in the NesquikSand, which reveals that the "vines" they can't reach are actually Laffy Taffy that happen to find the idea of Calhoun hitting Felix hilarious. Though the vines believe in the double standard, Calhoun clearly does not, and is reluctant to indulge the vines at Felix's insistence even when he reveals he can heal himself instantly. He does eventually get her to play along as it's the only chance they have to escape. Her concern is justified but averts any sort of female caretaker overtones since both are outside of their games at the time and so there's the possibility that if Felix can't heal himself properly, she could very well beat him to death.
• "Down Here!" Shot: Briefly, when Fix-It Felix Jr. knocks at the door of King Candy's castle and Sour Bill opens it. Felix at first doesn't see him until he looks down, along with the camera's viewpoint.
• Dreamworks Face: Ralph, on the movie poster.
• Drill Sergeant Nasty: Calhoun's in-game purpose is to be one of these to the other characters and to the first person shooter. Her first "scene" in the game is to outright insult the men military-style and says that if "they want to pee-pee in their big boy slacks they better keep it to themselves."
• Drives Like Crazy: To be expected in a racing game. In particular, Vanellope and her glitch/teleport. When, in the roster race, she teleports in front of her three main tormentors and causes them to crash out, she's driving backwards for a while.
• Driving Stick: The Sugar Rush cars have a clutch; neither Ralph nor Vanellope have any idea what any of the pedals are even called, and Ralph even refers to them as buttons at first. Cue hilarious Training Montage. Ralph's comment on the clutch could be a reference to the handful of arcade racing games that have a physical (but useless) clutch pedal, even when playing on manual transmission. A kid-friendly kart racing game certainly wouldn't dare to force people to use a realistic clutch.
• Drowning My Sorrows: Ralph appears to be trying to do this... in Tapper, appropriately enough. It's hinted to be fairly common with him, as when he doesn't show up for work, Felix first assumes he's passed out in the bathroom at Tapper's.
• Drunk on Milk: Even though it's implied that Tapper serves Root Beer, a few of the characters are seen intoxicated. Specifically, one of the soldiers from Hero's Duty. This is probably because the original Tapper was designed for bars and served Budweiser. The root beer version came later when the Moral Guardians protested a beer-serving game in kiddie arcades.
• Dub Name Change: Save Vanellope, all of the Sugar Rush racers got either their last names or their full names changed in the Brazilian version of the movie^note  If the name is not mentioned in the movie, it can be found in the online game adaption. The Danish and Norwegian dubs changed every single Sugar Rush character's name, even changing Vanellope to simply Vanilla.
  • ^{Click to check their Brazilian names} Racers:
    • Taffyta Muttonfudge changed to Taffyta Calda de Caramelo (Taffyta Caramel Syrup)
    • Crumbelina DiCaramello changed to Crumbelina Quebra-Queixo (Crumbelina Jawbreaker)
    • Gloyd Orangeboar changed to Gloyd Laranja-Lima (Gloyd Lime-Orange)
    • Adorabeezle Winterpop changed to Adora Pirulitéia (from "pirulito" (lollipop))
    • Minty Zaki changed to Menta Zaki (Mint Zaki)
    • Snowanna Rainbeau changed to Nevana Arco-Íris (From "neve" (snow) and "arco-íris" (rainbow))
    • Rancis Fluggerbutter changed to Rancis Arroz-Doce (Rancis Sweet-Rice)
    • Jubileena Bing-Bing changed to Jujubinha Bing Bing (a diminutive form of "jujuba" (gumdrop))
    • Swizzle "The Swizz" Malarkey changed to Swizzle "A Suíça" Caramelada ("A Suíça" means "The Swiss", "Caramelada" means "Caramelized". The name seems oddly feminine.)
    • Candlehead changed to Velusca (from "vela" (candle) and possibly the name "Veruska")

• Dude, Where's My Respect?: The Nicelanders treating Ralph as "just the guy that breaks things" is what sets the story off.
• Dummied Out: In-Universe examples include Vanellope's home in Diet Cola Mountain, which she describes as looking like an unfinished level, and the reveal that she's only a glitch because King Candy / Turbo tried to delete her from the game's source code.
• Dungeon Bypass: In Hero's Duty, the player character is supposed to enter the tower, climb it from within, fight enemies along the way, and claim the medal. Ralph just climbs the outside and breaks in at the top, and he does it without killing a single bug, perhaps because he does it while the game isn't being actively played (so the bugs aren't active).
• Dying as Yourself: Zig-zagged. A rare villainous example. As the Cy-Bug King Candy is destroyed, it alternates between the hypnotized Candy and the protesting Turbo, the latter being in charge as the body is melted by the volcano.
• Dying Moment of Awesome: Subverted, Ralph fully intends to sacrifice himself to stop the Cy-Bugs by diving from a great height into a volcano, but is saved at the last second by Vanellope.

Tropes E to H

• Earn Your Happy Ending: Ralph struggles to be heroic and nearly destroys the arcade world because of his mistakes, but manages to fix things, earn well-deserved respect, makes a couple new friends, and more than makes up for the harm he unwittingly caused to his game and Sugar Rush.
• Easily Forgiven:
  • Played with, humorously. In the end, Vanellope's bullies all scrounge for forgiveness, after she's revealed to be the rightful ruler of Sugar Rush. Vanellope orders them all put to death, then pardons them after they spend a good few seconds in pants-wetting, teary terror.
  • It doesn't take very long for Felix to forgive Ralph for what he's put him through. This is partially because Felix is simply just too nice a guy to hold a grudge for long, and partly because he's got a taste of what things are like from Ralph's point of view for the first time.
  • Shortly after, when Ralph breaks into Vanellope's Fungeon cell with her car now fully repaired. Granted, she would have to be pretty spiteful to turn down his help when she can choose between trying to accomplish her dream or staying locked up, but after a few apologies from Ralph, she's over what she saw as a devastating betrayal.
  • Finally, when Sugar Rush is about to be destroyed by Cy-Bugs, Vanellope forgives Ralph for inadvertently causing it and for causing her own impending death because she can't leave with a quiet "It's okay, Ralph".
• Edible Theme Naming: The characters in Sugar Rush are all named for foods, and some of their plush toys are scented.
• The Eeyore: Sour Bill. Except when Ralph interrogates him, he always speaks with a monotonous voice that is strongly reminiscent of the original Eeyore.
• Endless Daytime: The game of Sugar Rush is always bright and sunny, until the Cy-Bugs attack as a swarm.
• Epic Fail:
  • Subverted in the Bake-A-Car mini-game. Despite trashing the set, the resulting vehicle is miraculously functional. Probably helps that this was just the decorative part of the process. It just affected the appearance of the vehicle, which Vanellope (to Ralph's surprise) ends up loving.
  • Played straight later on when Felix tries to finally wreck something by using his hammer to break the bars on his jail cell... only it causes the bars to become twice as thick.
    Felix: Why do I fix everything I touch?!
• Eureka Moment:
  • Ralph has one when he throws his hard-earned medal at his game's monitor, dislodging the Out of Order sign on the other side... and giving him a clear view of Vanellope's image on the side of the arcade cabinet.
  • This happens with Vanellope when King Candy calls her a glitch while trying to ram her into a cave column, having her realize that she can glitch out of harm's way.
  • Ralph has one later when Calhoun explains why the Cy-Bugs in Sugar Rush are much more dangerous due to the lack of a beacon to keep them in check.
• Even Bad Men Love Their Mamas: Parodied when Calhoun yells for the troops in Hero's Duty to make their mothers proud, and Ralph shouts back that he loves his mama. It's justified in that he's only "officially" a bad guy.
• Everyone Has Standards: Ralph definitely does not like Vanellope at all in the first act of the film, but he still gets very indignant when he sees her getting bullied.
• Everything's Better with Princesses: Ultimately defied. Vanellope's original design invoked this trope since she was written as a princess but when she's turned back she wants to be President instead.
• Everything's Better with Sparkles:
  • Lampshaded during Vanellope's Transformation Sequence into a princess.
    Vanellope: Whoa! Hey, what's with all the magic sparkles?
  • The engine of her kart also spits sparkles when she guns it.
• Evil Laugh: Turbo breaks out some unending maniacal laughter that could rival the Joker during the climax — which only adds to his creepiness.It's hilarious on a meta level when you remember that his voice actor is Alan Tudyk: "Ha ha ha! Mine is an evil laugh! Now die!"
• Evil Minions: The Q*bert baddies eventually become these for Wreck-It Ralph himself during the bonus stage.
• Exact Words: King Candy tries to avoid getting hit by Ralph by putting on glasses and saying "You wouldn't hit a guy with glasses, would you?". Ralph takes the glasses and hits him with them. Then King Candy explains the joke.
  King Candy: You hit a guy with glasses. Hm. That's well played.
• Exiled from Continuity: Invoked In-universe. Vanellope, being a glitch, is unable to leave her game and forbidden from taking part in her game's main feature, races because Turbo/King Candy literally exiled her from the game's source code.
• Expository Theme Tune: Inverted. A song about Ralph and Felix is played right before the credits end—by Buckner & Garcia, appropriately enough.
• Expy: All of the principal leads in this film are expies of video game characters in some way. Disney also got the rights to use actual video game characters for cameos rather than just expies, à la Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Toy Story.
  • Ralph himself is a human Donkey Kong. The hero of the game, Felix, is an imitation of Mario (or, as he was called back in Donkey Kong, Jumpman). It's probably a coincidence, but Felix's name and appearance also remind of handyman Fred Fixit from LucasArts' obscure title Night Shift.
  • The names Fix-It Felix and Wreck-It Ralph are similar to that of obscure franchise Hammerin' Harry complete with similar catchphrases. And indeed, the beginning of the film shows Ralph's house getting demolished to make place for a series of apartments, which is exactly what happens to Hammerin' Harry at the beginning of the game. Observe. Wreck-It Ralph also alludes to Wrecking Crew, which starred a hammer-wielding Mario.
  • Sgt. Calhoun could be based on any number of commando characters from video games. But in particular she seems to be a cross between Samus and a Female Shepard, with the language kept family-friendly.
  • Sugar Rush at first seems like any other kart racing game from the '90s, only it's themed on candy. But Rich Moore stated that his favorite current game is Mario Kart, which means that's the basic inspiration. Indeed, it seems like a cross between Mario Kart and Candy Land. Also, portions of the Sugar Rush race course are clearly taken from various Mario Kart 64 courses, with the candy theme substituted in.
  • The creators admit King Candy's based on The Mad Hatter from Disney's version of Alice in Wonderland (who in turn was based on and voiced by Ed Wynn in his "Perfect Fool" persona).
  • In regards to King Candy, Turbo, in addition to being the name of a Sega arcade game, is a knock-off of the marquee chalky-skinned mascot from the Bally/Midway game Rally-X. His King Candy persona is one of The Wizard from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. He comes from another land (his own game), is leading his subjects on through manipulation and usurping the rightful ruler and having their memories locked away (Ozma and Vanellope), the hero comes to him for a favor (in Ralph's case, the medal he got from Hero's Duty), while he asks of something in return that involves the "villain" (Vanellope, which he calls "The Glitch", and smashing her candy car), and is ultimately a fraud hiding behind another image that makes the hero appreciate the things they have in life. There's even some cute allusions with the fact he's ruling over what can be considered Munchkins (the other candy racers) and has Oreo guards which chant, drill and move, in the same fashion as those from the movie.
  • King Candy is also noted to have some unsettling similarities to Judge Doom due to both characters using disguises throughout the majority of their respective films and possessing unnerving true forms.
  • In the same way that King Candy is an Expy of The Wizard of Oz, Vanellope is seen as one for Princess Ozma in the sense that she's the rightful ruler of the kingdom and was ousted through trickery, and has no memory of who she really is. And like Ozma she's eventually restored to her rightful place.
  • The arcade owner, Mr. Litwak, looks a very great deal like Walter Day.
  • Hero's Duty is a sci-fi themed FPS. While it's clearly named after Call of Duty, the sci-fi elements (space marine characters and insectoid enemies hatched from eggs like Alien Swarm) are more reminiscent of Halo with some Aliens and StarshipTroopers thrown in.
• Expy Coexistence: While Felix is based on the early Mario games where Mario faced off with Donkey Kong, he mentions Mario as existing in the same universe at the 30th Anniversary Party. (Apparently Mario is running late, and this is a common occurrence.)
• Extremely Short Time Span: With the exception of the introduction and the epilogue, the whole movie takes place within 48 hours of In-Universe time.
• Face Hugger: Ralph finds the medal but he accidentally hatches a Cy-Bug egg by stepping on it and the baby bug attacks Ralph by the face, sending him on an escape shuttle that blasts them to Sugar Rush.
• Failed a Spot Check: Calhoun's backstory is tragic because she forgot to do a perimeter check on her wedding day, allowing a Cy-Bug to get through and eat her fiancé. It's defied when she marries Felix because she has a lot of soldiers covering the window.
• Fake King: King Candy stole the throne from Vanellope before the events of the movie, erasing everyone's memories to fit. He's actually Turbo, having reskinned himself.
• Fake Memories: Everything the game characters remember about their backstory didn't actually happen; it's just part of their character design. It's specifically noted how, for Hero's Duty, Calhoun was designed with "the most tragic backstory ever". A second layer of fake memories were added to all the Sugar Rush characters after Turbo hacked the game and locked away their official memories so they'd all remember his "King Candy" persona as if he'd always been a part of their game and would think Vanellope, whose place he usurped, had always been a glitch.
• Fallen Hero: Turbo was a popular player-avatar (who are typically heroic), though he's strongly implied to have been an asshole even before he became evil.
• False Reassurance:
  Duncan: We're not going to hurt you, you little freak!!
• Family-Friendly Firearms:
  • Played with. Calhoun and her men are initially equipped with what appear to be plasma-based collapsible rifles. If one looks very closely (and slows down the footage) in the scene where they're shooting at Felix when he first enters Hero's Duty, though, spent casings can be seen falling out of the rifles as they're fired, although they still appear to be shooting lasers/plasma. Calhoun herself, however, also keeps a sidearm that's clearly using ballistics. She even checks the magazine before game jumping to Sugar Rush. This probably got a pass because the first time she fired it was for intimidation and the second time, the targets were immune to bullets anyway.
  • Averted with the taser that gets used on Ralph. That definitely hurt.
• Family-Unfriendly Death:
  • King Candy a.k.a. Turbo gets eaten alive by a Cy-Bug. That's pretty family-unfriendly right there, but then it turns out one death is not the end for him and he goes all One-Winged Angel. Fortunately, Ralph defeats him (as well as all the other Cy-Bugs) by causing the Diet Cola Volcano to erupt. Since "Turbo" is now just a Cy-Bug with Turbo's memories, the Cy-Bug's programming takes over and he starts flying into the geyser. Last thing we see of Turbo is him glitching between a hypnotized "King Candy" and his real face, which is screaming in horror as he flies into the geyser and immolates himself.
  • King Candy manages to convince Ralph that, if Vanellope is promoted to playable status, the players will see her glitches and assume the game is broken, forcing the arcade to decommission the machine. While player characters and NPCs will manage to evacuate safely, glitches like Vanellope won't, and will get sucked alive into a painful black hole of deletion, along with the game environment.
• Family-Unfriendly Violence:
  • Kano ripping out a zombie's heart at the meeting that opens the movie.
  • The ways Cy-Bugs are dispatched in Hero's Duty. It's lampshaded by Ralph: "When did video games become so violent and scary?!"
• Fantastic Racism: The villains are treated so poorly that they need to create a support group, while the characters of Sugar Rush act this way towards any and all glitches (though it is possible this is wholly due to King Candy reprogramming Sugar Rush).
• Fantastic Slur: "Going Turbo" is thrown at anyone who considers breaking character and/or abandoning one's game in order to shame them out of it.
• Fashionable Asymmetry: Ralph's overalls are missing a strap. Vanellope's stockings don't match. Appropriately, the car that they make when they team up is similarly asymmetrical.
• Fictional Video Game: Three are the movie's major settings: Fix-It Felix Jr. is the game that Ralph and Felix come from. Sgt. Calhoun comes from Hero's Duty, and Vanellope comes from Sugar Rush. A fourth one called Turbo Time is also mentioned, but its lead character ended up destroying it and another game (Roadblasters) out of jealousy. Simplistic but faithfully recreated online versions of Fix-It Felix, Hero's Duty and Sugar Rush are available at the movie's page on Disney site. A real Fix-It Felix Jr. arcade game was manufactured by Disney to promote the movie at the 2011 D23 Expo. In addition, Disney had (though, likely still has going) a sweepstakes contest in which fans can enter to win one of their own.
• Final Boss: King Candy/Turbo invokes during the film's climax (see Boss Battle above) "Welcome to the boss level!" Ralph must overcome this boss somehow in order to Save the World.
• Final Death: As Sonic's PSA in the opening chapter explains, if a character dies outside of their game, they don't regenerate, essentially making out-of-game death stick. It's justified in the sense that only their native game possesses the code needed to spawn their next life, and it can't exactly go making a copy of them if it doesn't know that they died. This makes Ralph's (almost) Heroic Sacrifice all the more tense when breaking out of Cy-Bug-Turbo's grasp.
• The First Cut Is the Deepest: Calhoun has... complications trying to get over her backstory. It is called the "most tragic backstory ever" because her first love was eaten at the altar.
• First-Person Ghost: The player character in the lightgun shooting game Hero's Duty is a short, nondescript, voiceless robot on caterpillar treads with a gun in one arm and a (two-way) TV screen for a face; other Hero's Duty characters (like Calhoun) refer to it as the "first person shooter". When their game isn't being played, it does have some personality of its own — in particular, it takes offense at Ralph getting too close to it during gameplay and causing the player an untimely Game Over.
• Flashback Stares: Calhoun falls into a series of flashbacks from her "most tragic backstory ever" when Felix (inexplicably) matches her deceased husbands catchphrase "dynamite gal".
• Flash Step: Vanellope's glitching, once she can control it, looks like either this or teleportation.
• Floating Limbs: Sour Bill, as well as a few other candy denizens of Sugar Rush, has neither arms nor legs but just floating feet and hands.
• Foil:
  • The cheerful and straight-arrow Felix working with the rough and cynical Calhoun.
  • The jealous and attention-seeking Turbo as a dark reflection of Ralph's own dissatisfaction and jealousy stemming from his own situation. They both leave their games in order to take what they think is their due, but Ralph is ultimately good-hearted, cares about others and makes up for his mistakes whereas Turbo cares about no-one but himself and is willing to ruin lives to get what he wants. Ralph was the antagonist in his home game and becomes a hero, whereas Turbo was the protagonist in his home game but becomes a villain. This is why Ralph is accused of "going Turbo" at the start of the movie.
  • Ralph and Felix. The latter is loved by everyone, while the former is rejected by everyone, even though both of them are critical for their world's survival.
  • Ralph and Gene. Ralph is a large, powerful, imposing guy whose job is to wreck the penthouse, and he's capable of destroying nearly anything. But, outside of gameplay, he's pretty good-natured and wishes that people weren't afraid of him. "Big" Gene on the other hand has a squat stature and blips around with little 8-bit jerky motions that make him entirely non-threatening (both attributes shared by the other Nicelanders, all of whom essentially play the role of Innocent Bystander). However, he at least seems to have a big ego despite the fact that his job is for Ralph to throw him out of a window, and he has no problem getting in Ralph's face to try and intimidate him during the party.
• Food Porn:
  • Sugar Rush, combining Level Ate (used as a Racing Game setting, hence the "Rush") with Pixar-esque visuals. They actually did extensive research (as well as going through boxes of candy and confections) for the sake of it, and it shows.
  • Ralph is also shown eating cherries as big as watermelons. "Fresh from Pac-Man."
  • The cake at the party, with different flavors for each apartment, is pretty extravagant. Even the mud is actually chocolate.
• Forced into Their Sunday Best: Vanellope reacts this way to her princess attire once Sugar Rush resets. She has to lift up the cumbersome skirt just to turn around, and can't wait to glitch out of it. She's wearing it again at Felix and Calhoun's wedding, and is seen pulling on the collar.
• Forced to Watch:
  • Cy-Bug/Turbo intends to force Ralph to watch Vanellope be eaten by Cy-Bugs. Big mistake. In an inversion, his Turbo self can only struggle in horror as Bug-King Candy draws itself to a fiery doom.
  • Also a rare non-villainous example when Ralph hangs Vanellope by the back of her hoodie from a tree so that all she can do is watch helplessly as he destroys the car they built together, crushing her dreams in the process.
• Foreign Language Theme: AKB48, a Japanese idol group, provides the ending theme, "Sugar Rush", which also plays when Ralph enters the video game itself.
• Foreshadowing: Many:
  • As Felix and Calhoun prepare to go into Sugar Rush after Ralph, there's a particularly subtle bit of foreshadowing among the graffiti on the wall. The word Turbo, and the 8-bit face of the man himself, before the tale of what "going Turbo" even means. Then we see Vanellope locked up in the Fungeon, one of the paintings on the wall is of a clown in a racecar doing Turbo's trademark pose.
  • The fact that Ralph survived falling into the taffy swamp calls into question whether the Cy-Bug actually drowned in the taffy swamp.
  • Several points in the film demonstrate that Vanellope's glitching extends to whatever she's in contact with, the first example being Taffyta. During the climax, this is how King Candy is exposed as Turbo.
  • As early as the Bad-Anon scene, people tell Ralph of the dangers of "going Turbo" when he wishes to become a hero. It's referring to Turbo's insane game hopping, which resulted in two arcade machines being removed from the arcade. Before it gets properly explained by Felix, King Candy is the first person to hint that it means more than just abandoning one's game (even if it's technically become a euphemism for that). King Candy immediately assumes Ralph is there to steal his game and goes ballistic at the very idea, hinting that he's more familiar with the subject than he lets on. Later, we find out that Candy is Turbo, and has in fact done exactly that with Sugar Rush.
  • Cy-Bugs become what they eat. It's demonstrated when one of them eats a gun. Then they go to a world of candy and become candy-themed. Then they eat King Candy/Turbo...
  • King Candy doesn't quite look like the other racers in Sugar Rush. He's old, while they are all young, they're rather animesque while he's based on the Mad Hatter, and his clothes don't seem to follow the same design theme as theirs. It's almost like he doesn't really belong in that game. This is reinforced when he goes into the source code, he reviews the Konami Code written on a napkin from Tapper's, implying that he is from a time before Sugar Rush.
  • There's also King Candy's box of code in the source code. All the boxes are uniform — even Vanellope's box clearly shown outside the main code, but King Candy's is at least three times as large, colored differently, and (if you look closely) is a mess of twisted code, all serving to indicate that there's a lot more to him than just one racer.
  • Pay attention and you'll see Turbo's face among the other blue files. Really◊.
  • Also, Vanellope's box in that same scene. It noticeably shoots off sparks from the connection points as the camera has it in focus, clearly implying that it was, at one point, connected to something. Since it isn't connected anymore, and King Candy is the only one who could access that area, it foreshadows that Vanellope isn't a glitch, she is an intended player character, and King Candy changed it.
  • Watch carefully during the opening scene, when the camera is doing its pan through Litwak's arcade. You can get a clear glimpse of Vanellope's picture on the side of the Sugar Rush console, over an hour before the movie drops the Big Reveal. If you're thinking that something doesn't quite add up, hold onto that feeling. Also if you look even closer it gives even more foreshadowing if you see she is driving King Candy's car a.k.a. the vehicle the Ruler of Sugar Rush drives.
  • This (fake) commercial for Sugar Rush, supposedly from 1997, clearly shows Vanellope as a playable character.
  • When Vanellope first meets Ralph, she jokes about using the "royal we". Later on, when she's giving Ralph her hand-made hero medal she makes Ralph kneel and anoints him like a knight, saying that he is now "her royal chump". Even with her and everyone else's memories locked away, Princess Vanellope Von Schweetz is still subconsciously aware of who she's supposed to be. There's also the fact that she's the only character with "Von" in her name, and "Von" used to be for nobility.
  • Right before they enter the car factory, Ralph and Vanellope sees a "No glitches" sign with the latter's face in it posted on the door that has a crown shaped logo on top of it. When Ralph punches the door, the crown logo also fell.
  • Also during Vanellope and Ralph's first meeting, as Ralph climbs away from her until she's off screen, suddenly she's in front of him again on a higher branch, hinting at her teleportation powers later on.
  • Ralph comments that King Candy's palace is pink. Candy insists it's clearly salmon. We laugh. But isn't pink a color associated with a different kind of royalty?
  • Turbo's original game is a racing game.
  • The second time Ralph and King Candy meet, Ralph is in a bad mood and tries several times to hit him. King Candy is genuinely afraid of Ralph and keeps dodging and avoiding his attacks, not just because he's a wimp, but because King Candy is outside his own game so if Ralph succeeded in striking him down, it would be game over for real for King Candy.
  • King Candy recognizes Ralph when no-one else from Sugar Rush does, though Ralph doesn't know him in turn. This is because King Candy is really Turbo, whose game came out around the same time as Ralph's. Not to mention, the two games were neighbors.
  • Even for Sugar Rush, King Candy's cart is very feminine.
  • If you look closely, you can see that King Candy's coattails look like a beetle shell.
  • Combining this with Theme Song Reveal, this is Vanellope's theme, not played alone through most of the movie. In parts, it cuts an 8-bit-esque, "princessy" theme that was presumably original to "Sugar Rush".
  • During the Turbo exposition scene, you may well notice that Turbo's voice is the same as King Candy's.
  • As the opening shows the Arcade fast-forwarding, it shows arcade machines leaving while others arrive. One of the ones that leaves is Turbo Time.
  • After Vanellope uses the medal she stole from Ralph, he arrives in the scene and wreaks havoc. Vanellope ultimately hides in King Candy's car. While everyone has their attention on Ralph, she runs and passes by Crumbelina's car. The former is her original car, while the latter is the one she'll use to rescue Ralph at the climax.
  • The Cy-Bug that Ralph accidentally brought to Sugar Rush is seen multiple times, hinting that it might be important. It is the same one that merges with King Candy.
  • Vanellope seems barely able to drive at first, but once she manages to do a full lap on her practice track, her skill level suddenly goes way up, demonstrated by the way she executes a perfect turn-into-the-skid "drift" move on her way up to the ramp — a hint that she really is a coded racer character, not just a glitch that wants to be one.
  • The horn on King Candy's kart (which actually belongs to Vanellope) plays the first few notes of "Hail to the Chief," hinting at Vanellope's eventual decision to be a president rather than a princess.
  • Calhoun's fiancé actually looks remarkably like Felix, if Felix were drawn in the more realistic style of Hero's Duty, from sandy brown hair and blue eyes, to his build being much slighter than other male characters in his own game, all the way to a similar smile. No wonder he gave Calhoun flashbacks!
• For Your Own Good: King Candy's explanation to Ralph for his doing everything in his power to stop Vanellope from racing — if she wins and joins the roster, the players will see her glitching, think the game is broken, and it will be unplugged. Since glitches can't leave their own game, Vanellope will be trapped inside when the game is unplugged, and King Candy doesn't want her to die like that. Ralph uses the phrase after this conversation right before he smashes the cart he and Vanellope made together to keep her from racing. Ralph means it. King Candy didn't.

• Fourth-Wall Observer:
  • All the characters know they're in a video game. They have the ability to see the player, by looking at what is essentially the game's "camera". How it's shown differs from game to game: Fix-It Felix Jr. has a great big window in the sky, while Hero's Duty has the computer-screen head of a First-Person Shooter robot on tank treads. The arcade is never seen from inside Sugar Rush, but due to the gameplay it can be assumed it has a similar system to Hero's Duty. With Sugar Rush, it's likely that the camera view is provided by a hovering marshmallow with a TV camera hooked into the jumbotrons at the start/finish line.
  • During the last race of the movie, the camera is shown moving in behind King Candy in the usual way for racing games, as if he was the playable character. No other racers appear to have the same effect, and when seen later from different perspectives, there is no visible camera anywhere near him — though since the race was taking place after hours the "first person racer" would have no reason to be physically present then.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: Plenty, though you'll be hard pressed to actually see them on the Blu-Ray release (you know, the one that's in HD so you could pick out details more easily) due to an auto-playing "intermission" that pops up when you hit pause (though it can be turned off).
  • A close observation of the Heads-Up Display when Ralph is in Markowski's armor before he goes into Hero's Duty will lead one to notice some text messages Calhoun is making to another soldier about the real Markowski being AWOL in Tapper's.
  • Turbo gets points for mugging to the movie's camera for a split-second, complete with his signature thumbs-up. See for yourself◊.
  • Similary, there are a few shots of the Turbo Time arcade cabinet near the opening that shows that the game was a top down racing game.
  • There are two others that if one pays close enough attention, and/or remembers what Vanellope looks like from the trailer.
    • The first is an early shot (from a different angle) of the Wham Shot mentioned later on down this page, during the 30-year time montage during Ralph's speech during the Bad-Anon meeting.
    • The second is when Moppet Girl is reading the lit-up Sugar Rush placard, if you pause it when you see Taffyta standing in front of her kart, look at the tiny images beside her, more specifically the racer at the left of the top row (closest to Taffyta).
• A Friend in Need: When Ralph realizes that Vanellope's more than a glitch with a Dream-Crushing Handicap, he rushes back to Sugar Rush to help her.
• Friendly Rivalry: At closing, the two Street Fighters comment on their rough day and head to Tapper's together. Considering it's Ryu and Ken, this trope is obvious.
• Friendship Song: "When Can I See You Again?" is a song about a friend having to go, but wanting to know when they can meet again.
• Frothy Mugs of Water:
  • Tapper is treated as the local bar, and all signs point to it being the original, un-Bowdlerized Budweiser Tapper, with the original bartender and characters getting intoxicated. Yet a line of dialogue indicates that the beverage served is root beer.
  • Averted with the Niceland penthouse; it has a fully stocked bar and the residents are frequently seen drinking martinis. Gene is drinking one when Ralph returns to his game with the medal.
  • Also, in a flashback with Sgt Calhoun and her fiancé, they're seen with what appear to be glasses of wine.
• Funny Background Event:
  • Some of the soldiers in Calhoun's platoon glance and smirk at each other during the whole Love at First Punch scenario with Felix.
  • Watch the scenes in Game Central Station carefully. Of note is when Calhoun first describes the Cy-Bugs to Felix, Sonic can be seen showing off to Glenn the Turtle.
• Fusion Dance: What happens when King Candy is eaten by a Cy-Bug in the climax — a Cy-Bug formatted to look and act like King Candy.
• Futile Hand Reach: During the climax, after Turbo drags Ralph high up into the air, the latter spots Vanellope trapped before the gates and symbolically reaches out to her while shouting her name.
• Game-Breaking Bug:
  • In a flashback, Turbo's antics crash the Roadblasters game brought in to replace him. Specifically, when he crashes into the player's car, the entire screen goes nuts with errors.
  • As a logo gag, the Disney Vanity Plate at the end of the credits glitches out and becomes a kill screen because of all the characters meshing together, which itself counts as a Shout-Out to the same thing in Pac-Man.
• Game Changer: Ralph is convinced that it's pointless to continue helping Vanellope, as he feels any further assistance will doom her home game of Sugar Rush. Until Ralph notices official artwork of Vanellope on the side of the game cabinet and returns to Sugar Rush, now determined to get answers as to what's going on with Vanellope. Indeed, this new information ultimately leads to bringing down Turbo's horrid reign in Sugar Rush.
• Gamer Chick: Moppet Girl, that young blonde girl in the arcade, plays Hero's Duty and Fix-It Felix Jr. Ironically, she is prevented from playing Sugar Rush, which seems to be marketed towards girls, because two boys are hogging it. In the epilogue, she finally gets to play it and uses Vanellope as her avatar.
• Genius Loci: Surge Protector is the surge protector.
• Genki Girl: Vanellope, who can snap from calm and snarky one moment to literally bouncing off the walls as if on a sugar high while teleporting all over the place and cheering at the top of her lungs when happy or excited... though it's worth noting that the events of the movie are likely the first times she's had something to be excited about in a long time.
• Genre Blindness:
  • The Cy-Bugs either do not or cannot realize that they're just game characters. Unusual for the trope, this makes them extremely dangerous since unlike other Bad Guys they don't know when to stop and the only thing keeping them in check is the end-of-game reset beacon.
  • Invoked when Ralph tries to take part in the modern, ultra-realistic light-gun shooter Hero's Duty. The writers mention that the game's world was intended to be a place where Ralph, a throwback to 8-bit 1980s games, would be completely out of his depth, and it shows. The crowning moment is when Ralph tries to rush into the lab, believing it to be a safe haven from the Cy-Bugs, unaware that a lab would be exactly the kind of place where the Cy-Bugs would be coming from.
    Ralph: I thought this was going be like Centipede!
• Genre Savvy: Everyone has Medium Awareness; the fact that a small percentage of the population doesn't is a plot point.
• Genre Throwback: In-universe: after the events of the movie, Fix-It Felix Jr. becomes a popular arcade game again, thanks to all the decommissioned arcade characters (like Q*bert) it now hosts, all of whom participate in gameplay and in bonus levels. Ralph says players love it for "being retro", which he figures means something like "old, but cool".
• Gentle Giant: Ralph, when not playing the bad guy, is a big softie. It doesn't take him long to become Vanellope's surrogate big brother despite the rocky start to their relationship.
• Get a Hold of Yourself, Man!:
  • While stuck in the NesquikSand with Calhoun, Felix confidently states that he can simply hop free. When that fails, he freaks out ("I'm hopless... this is hopeless!") and nearly drowns himself by flailing, forcing Calhoun to smack some calm into him. She even says "get a hold of yourself." This also ends up saving them as the slapstick attracts the Laffy Taffy to them.
  • It's also said later by Ralph during Felix's rant about the troubles he went through searching for him.
• Get Out!: Calhoun demands that Felix leaves her shuttle after he called her a dynamite gal which pushed her Trauma Button.
• Getting Crap Past the Radar: Has its own page.
• Glamour Failure: Vanellope's glitch spreading over King Candy causes him to revert to his true appearance of Turbo.
• Go into the Light: The Cy-Bugs are programmed to be drawn to the beacon whenever Hero's Duty resets, in a manner very reminiscent of bugs being drawn to a bug-zapper. Played for Laughs at first... then very much Played for Drama during the climax. Also Virus!!King Candy/Turbo's last words.
• Go-Karting with Bowser: Ralph and Felix are reasonably polite with each other when they aren't playing their game, though averted in the case of the Nicelanders who are rude, wary, insensitive, or all three towards Ralph.
• Good Bad Bugs: In-universe example. Vanellope eventually learns to use her glitching as a teleport. In the ending, Ralph says the players love it.
• Good Is Not Nice: Central to Calhoun's character is the idea that she is fighting for "humanity's freedom" and also a rough-mannered Sergeant Rock. It is averted in Felix's case: a good guy and also almost painfully nice.
• Good Needs Evil: Quite literally in this case. Without the villains/rivals/etc., many of the games would have zero gameplay. A game really is only as good as its villain. The plot is kicked off by the utter lack of appreciation Ralph receives for just doing his absolutely vital job.
• Good Thing You Can Heal: Felix tells Calhoun he can heal himself with his hammer so she shouldn't be afraid to punch him.
• Gory Discretion Shot:
  • The destruction of Vanellope's car is shown with as much discretion as if it were a person getting shot.
  • Played straight with Turbo, though he comes back later.
• Gosh Dang It to Heck!: Both Fix-It Felix and Sgt. Calhoun play this in different ways. Felix is a very polite, old-fashioned person and may not even know any words stronger than "goshdarn"; Calhoun uses very... colorful language that sounds like it SHOULD be filthy.
  Fix-It Felix Jr.: I don't have to do boo; forgive my potty mouth.
• Go Ye Heroes, Go and Die: Ralph tries to give Vanellope a pre-race pep talk, but he can't avoid reminding her how much is riding on it. Fortunately she shakes it off almost instantly.
• Green-Eyed Monster: The reason why going Turbo is a bad thing (besides the fact a character in a game that is not their own will not regenerate upon death) is that Turbo, a protagonist of his own racing game, was upset at the attention Roadblasters was stealing from him. He decided to enter that game, which caused glitches and got both games decommissioned. Turbo still hasn't learned from his lesson as King Candy.
• Grew Beyond Their Programming: Most of the cast have grown beyond simply playing their roles in their games. Even Surge Protector is revealed to be a graffiti artist. It is averted with the Cy-Bugs, whose hard-coded imperative to Go into the Light cannot be overcome even by King Candy/Turbo.
• The Grovel: A non-romantic version. After he broke her heart to save her and the subsequent Plot-Mandated Friendship Failure, Ralph eventually comes to his senses and sincerely apologizes to Vanellope about him being such a dickhead and destroying her kart.
• Guest Fighter: Ralph is a playable character in Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, presumably in return for Sonic's appearance in the film.
• Guys Smash, Girls Shoot: Ralph punches things, Felix hits things with a hammer, and Calhoun fires guns. Yet this isn't really played straight, as Calhoun's firearms are treated as just as dangerous as actual firearms. Plus she can throw a mean punch when she has to.
• Hair Decorations: Vanellope wears a hair ribbon made of licorice and she has various candy bits stuck in her hair.
• Hammerspace: Everyone from Hero's Duty literally pull their weapons out of empty air. The weapons seem to be part of their code — Calhoun produces her rifle from nowhere during the climax in Sugar Rush. Although if you look closely, it's more like an invisible Sticks to the Back.
• Hand Signals: As the arcade closes, Calhoun hears what she thinks is a Cy-Bug and raises a fist in the military "Hold" signal to alert her soldiers chatting behind her.
• Healing Shiv: Felix's hammer acts as this. Whether he wants it to or not.
• Heart Symbol: Heart symbols appear on-screen when Calhoun plants a kiss on Felix in the finale.
• Heel: Zangief perceives himself as one. All villains are this by the original wrestling definition. They go out and play bad guys but most of them are perfectly nice people off the clock.
• Heel–Face Turn: Ralph attempts to pull this off. The entire idea of "Face" and "Heel" and what it really means to be either is examined and played around with during the story.
• Heel Realization:
  • Zangief had this epiphany while crushing a man's skull like a sparrow's egg between his thighs, but he learned to live with it.
  • There's another example that actually sticks, unlike the Zangief example: when King Candy a.k.a. Turbo Racer's manipulations of Sugar Rush's code are fixed, the other racers all get their memories back... including the memory of Vanellope von Schweetz being their true ruler, and thus they realize that their jackass behavior to Vanellope earlier was completely inexcusable. They all quickly apologize and admit what heels they were.
• Heh Heh, You Said "X": In an Overly Long Gag when Vanellope hears that Ralph's medal came from Hero's Duty, much to Ralph's complete annoyance. It's kind of something to expect when a character is being played by Sarah Silverman.
  Vanellope: Bet ya gotta watch your step in a game called "Hero's Doody"!
• Held Gaze: Between Felix and Calhoun when they get out of the NesquikSand. The moment gets exaggerated by the Laffy Taffies, that is, until Calhoun fires her weapon into the air to get them to knock it off.
• Hellhound: Parodied with the devil dogs, who, like all non-racer characters in Sugar Rush are sweets.
• Helmets Are Hardly Heroic:
  • Vanellope doesn't wear a helmet when racing, and her cabinet art doesn't depict her with one either. Only some concept art of her racing outfit shows her wearing headgear.
  • Calhoun spends most of the film helmet-less, even in the climax. However, she and her men all wear helmets during gameplay in Hero's Duty and only remove their helmets after each round of play ends (except Markowski, as seen in Tapper).
• Heroic Sacrifice: Ralph fully intended to go down with all the Mentos into the molten hot diet cola. Vanellope, in full control of her glitching, had none of that.
  Turbo: It's Game Over for the both of you.
  Ralph: No. Just for me.
• The Hero's Journey: Ralph's story hits all the major points — receiving a call to adventure (The Bet with Gene) going into the Unknown World (the medal search), trials and tribulations (the Bug War and all the things he does with Vanellope), the descent into the Abyss (his return to a soon-to-be-unplugged home game world after wrecking his only friendship), the Transformation (recognizing and reciting the Bad Guy Affirmation) and Atonement (fixing Vanellope's cart, stopping the Cy-Bug invasion, and stopping his game from getting unplugged), and finally the Return (going back to his role as a "bad guy" with new respect and personal understanding).
• Hold Your Hippogriffs: Some here and there, though a lot of the phrases used are downright strange even without being altered to fit video games. Also, everyone from Sugar Rush alters their phrases to be candy-based.
• Hollywood Hacking: The Sugar Rush game code that King Candy manipulates is a gorgeous example where he interacts with icons in a glowing energy sphere thing..Turbo is quite the programmer for an old 8-bit game character. Though he's had 30 years of experience.
• Honor Before Reason: Felix sticks around Sugar Rush during the climax, even though his only weapon is a Healing Shiv, because he's determined to help Calhoun and Vanellope. Though, his healing weapon can repair Calhoun's weapons, so he isn't completely useless.
• Horde of Alien Locusts: The Cy-Bugs are explosively breeding alien insects that devour everything around them. They would eat the entire arcade's worth of game worlds if left unchecked.
• Hub Level: Game Central Station (a.k.a. the power strip), where one can travel between games.
• Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: Ralph and Vanellope because she can fit in the palm of his hand.
• Hurricane of Puns: When Vanellope first hears about Hero's Duty, she starts making a string of Toilet Humour jokes about that title.
• Hypocritical Humor:
  • After Ralph spends most of the introduction lamenting the fact that no-one seems to appreciate him even though he's just doing his job, he gives the Surge Protector a very hard time for just doing his job. It's justified by the fact that he's always stopped when entering and leaving Game Central Station and believes Surge Protector is just profiling, although considering that he is smuggling "contraband" (cherries from Pac-Man) kind of justifies Surge Protector's actions.
  Mr. Surge Protector: Anything to declare?
  Ralph: I hate you.
  Mr. Surge Protector: I get that a lot.

  Taken even further in the Polish version

  Mr. Surge Protector: Anything to declare?
  Ralph: I love you.
  Mr. Surge Protector: Very funny.
  • When Ralph comes across the Hero's Duty private, Markowski, in the lost and found at Tapper's, and asks to tag along back to Hero's Duty, but Markowski refuses, saying "Only the best and bravest serve in our corps!" A split second later, he sees a cockroach on Ralph's shoulder, screams like a little girl, and runs head-first into the wall, knocking himself unconscious. (Though, it may be a subversion after we actually get to see the gameplay inside Hero's Duty; or a justification given what the bugs in his home game are like.)
  • Another example is Ralph's anger at Vanellope for stealing his medal. You know, the one he himself stole?
  • Vanellope insults Ralph that he seems homeless. Later on, she reveals that she sleeps next to the dangerous Diet Cola Hot Springs to avoid getting incarcerated for being a glitch. Granted, she still had it better than Ralph did as while he sleeps on a pile of bricks, Vanellope uses a spongecake as a bed plus candy and snack foods to make a tent and furniture.
  • King Candy asking Ralph if he's "going Turbo", since that's what he himself did when he was Turbo.

Tropes I to L

• I Did What I Had to Do: King Candy explains that he cannot allow Vanellope to race and get onto the roster, as her glitchy nature would put the game at risk of being unplugged and kill her in the process. Though it turns out that this is largely a fabrication.
  King Candy: Do you know what the hardest part about being a king is? Doing what's right, no matter what.
• I Gave My Word:
  • Inverted; Vanellope reminds Ralph that "we shook on it".
  • Played straight with Gene, who, after Ralph returns to Fix-It Felix Jr. with his medal, gives the wrecker the key to the penthouse.
    Gene: Never let it be said that I'm not a man of my word. The place is yours, Ralph.
• I Let Gwen Stacy Die: Calhoun's backstory was that her fiancé was eaten by a Cy-Bug on their wedding day after she forgot to do a perimeter check. This ends up being much sillier than it sounds, as the bug comes out of nowhere, and she immediately pulls out a giant minigun from under her dress and starts shooting, screaming in terror. She learned from her mistake, as seen during her wedding to Felix.
• Imagine Spot:
  • Ralph has one when he's claiming the medal he "won" in Hero's Duty of him becoming the center of attention in Niceland whilst Gene is seen sitting on Ralph's stump, crying 8-bit tears.
  • He has another one of the fate that would befall Vanellope as King Candy describes it to him. It's considerably less funny than the first one.
• Immortality Field: As long as a video game character is in their own game, they will regenerate upon death. If they are in another game, they are dead permanently.
• Improv: Unlike most animated films, the principal actors regularly recorded audio sessions together in the same room, a situation which led to a lot of improvising.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: Ryu in the beginning when he asks Ken if he wants to come with him to Tapper's.
• Indestructible Edible: The jawbreakers found in Sugar Rush cannot be broken by anything. At least until Ralph splits one in half. See Made of Indestructium for more info.
• Infinite Supplies: As seen by Ralph's sleeping place, when Felix fixes the building, he does not summon the bricks back, but creates new ones which he can do for an unlimited amount of time.
• Informed Attractiveness: Calhoun. Felix, coming from an 8-bit game, might see her "realistic" face as more attractive, as lower definition characters look more cartoony.
  Felix: Look at that HIGH DEFINITION on your face! It's amazing!
• In-Joke: The code sequence that King Candy uses to access Sugar Rush's source code is the Konami Code.
• Ink-Suit Actor: Ralph, Felix, Vanellope and Calhoun each bear at least a slight resemblance to their respective voice actors. Check this image◊ for comparison. In an interesting inversion of the trope, Lynch has subsequently cosplayed Calhoun in real life!
• Inn Between the Worlds: Game Central Station is a surge protector that connects all the arcade machines together in reality, but serves as this for the game characters. It looks like a train station but it functions like a residence for characters of unplugged games.
• Innocently Insensitive: Felix did not realize how unsatisfied Ralph was with his situation until he gets a taste of it himself. The fact that Ralph is a nice guy and was so overly polite that he never says anything about it directly didn't help matters.
• Insistent Terminology:
  • King Candy's palace isn't pink, it's salmon. This hints/foreshadows at the fact that the castle isn't technically his.
  • Vanellope first objects to Taffyta calling her a glitch and says she just has "pixlexia". But afterwards Vanellope does call herself a glitch evidenced when she tells Ralph "Glitches can't leave their game! It's one of the joys of being me."
• Inspirationally Disadvantaged: A refreshing aversion. There are those who see Vanellope's glitching as equivalent to a disability (she even calls it "pixlexsia".) However, she's also a well-developed character and accepts her glitch without Narm. In fact, she ultimately incorporates the glitch-teleport into her post-reset code since it has become part of her identity, and also because she turned it into a really cool superpower.
• Instant Expert: Vanellope picks up race driving with astonishing speed. Justified, as she was coded to be a racer, but was forced to forget how. When she says "racing is in my code", she's actually on to something.
• Instantly Proven Wrong:
  • While Ralph whales on a jawbreaker to vent his rage, Vanellope points out that he won't be able to break it but before she can finish her sentence, Ralph cracks it in half.
  • As Ralph asserts Calhoun that the cy-bug died in the swamp, a swarm of cy-bugs burst out of the ground.
• Insult of Endearment: Ralph and Vanellope start using these after a while, such as "president fart feathers" for Vanellope and "stinkbrain" for Ralph.
• Intelligible Unintelligible: Q*bert speaks but not with words so Felix has to translate.
• Intercontinuity Crossover: The dinosaur from Meet the Robinsons is a game character.
• Intergenerational Friendship: Ralph and Vanellope not only look like they are vastly different ages but their game cabinets have a 15 year age difference. They strike up a Like Brother and Sister relationship.
• In-Universe Camera: The action inside Hero's Duty is displayed to the player by a camera robot that travels with the soldiers and simulates the first person perspective for the player. Naturally, they call it the "First-Person Shooter" and it suffers Camera Abuse.
• Ironic Echo: "Have some candy!" First it is King Candy giving his subjects literal candy, then it becomes a Pre-Asskicking One-Liner during a race and then it becomes lethal when he fights Ralph in the climax.
• Ironic Echo Cut:
  • Played for Drama after Ralph has stormed out of the penthouse celebration, determined to earn a medal.
    Mary: He's not serious, is he?
    Gene: [scoffing] Of course he's not serious.
    [cut]
    Ralph: [to the bartender of Tapper] I've never been more serious in my life.
  • It has this when Vanellope shows off her kart, the "Lickety-Split", which is notably less impressive than the other racers'.
    Ralph: [wincing] Sheesh, it looks like she built it herself.
    Vanellope: [smugly] Built it myself.
• Irony: The chocolate cookie sandwich guards chanting "O-re-o, ore-o"? They're not actually Oreos (look at the cookie pattern when they're in the throne room).
• Isn't It Ironic?: "Shut Up and Drive" by Rihanna is played over the montage of Ralph putting Vanellope through driving school. That song is actually about sexual intercourse, not auto racing...
• It's All About Me:
  • Gene and Vanellope accuse Ralph of thinking only of himself because he abandons both of them for a medal.
  • Turbo/King Candy's motivation is hogging attention to the point that both his and the other game are unplugged.
• It Is Pronounced "Tro-PAY": Satan insists on the pronunciation Sah-Teen, which hints that he's from Satans Hollow (there was a weak attempt to use an alternate pronunciation to keep the Moral Guardians at bay back in the day; no-one paid any attention). Why have a villain from an obscure bottom-shooter with these legends? Well, the designer would go on to make TRON next.
• It's X. I Hate X.:
  Ralph: Chocolate! I hate chocolate!
• "I Want" Song: A deleted scene on the Blu-Ray reveals that the writers had originally planned for Ralph to sing such a song in the movie... only to be interrupted from singing because he's completely tone-deaf. The audio commentary for this scene even mentions the trope by name.
• Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique: Ralph putting Sour Bill in his mouth if he doesn't tell him the truth behind Sugar Rush:
  Ralph: How many licks would it take to get to your center?
• Jaw Drop:
  • In a bit of Mood Whiplash, Pac-Man does this hilariously after Ralph accidentally destroys the Nicelanders' cake.
  • Ralph and Felix do this when King Candy is revealed to be Turbo.
• Jerkass Has a Point:
  • Played with. King Candy's reasons for preventing Vanellope from racing are legitimate — if people think the game is glitchy, the game will be unplugged. Van being a glitch, she won't be able to escape to Game Central Station like the rest meaning she'll die. Of course, while the sentiment is true (no-one wants a glitchy game, she can't escape and would die, etc.), King Candy has ulterior motives and reasons for stopping her since it would unravel his long con, and he is the reason she is a glitch, instead of himself. Her glitching ultimately turns out to be a (possibly intentional) Good Bad Bug.
  • Also, Mayor Gene delivers a lengthy and hurtful guilt trip to Ralph after Ralph returns to Fix-It Felix Jr. to find the game evacuated and soon to be unplugged. While Gene was the ringleader and most obnoxious of the Nicelanders who dismissed and ostracized Ralph (causing him to leave in the first place), him calling Ralph out on his selfishness and the shortsightedness of his actions is not only accurate, but it quite likely cuts deeper and hammers in his failure more coming from an antagonistic character like Gene than it would have coming from a consummate good guy like Felix.
  • Ralph, for his part, may be destructive and have a bad temper, which resulted in him inadvertently ruining the anniversary party and abandoning the game to prove his detractors wrong, but he also has plenty reason to be upset. He's been shunned and has lived in the dump for thirty years, and the Nicelanders and Felix never even bothered to ask him how he feels or help out. The destruction isn't nearly as bad as it seems either, since dead characters regenerate instantly and damage can be fixed with a magic hammer in seconds. One could argue that the Nicelanders may have had a point in banning him from this specific party, since characters from other games don't regenerate, though considering that Ralph is an integral part of the game it's hard to excuse not inviting him to celebrate the 30th anniversary of said game. The fact that Ralph has never even eaten cake at all indicates that they've done nothing but ostracize him, which leaves them with no excuse. So it makes sense that at the end of the film every one of these issues have to be addressed by Felix and the Nicelanders.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold:
  • Ralph is a very decent person with a good heart, but is also selfish and has quite the temper on him. Though he always shows his better nature in time, he initially makes things constantly worse by acting only in his own best interest.
  • Vanellope is a mouthy, self-centered little brat, but she's still very likable once you're her friend and definitely a good person.
• Jerk-to-Nice-Guy Plot: Vanellope when she first shows up comes off as, to be it in Ralph's words, rude since she heckled Ralph. We later see that Vanellope was just being lonely, she doesn't have a friend to talk to and that she's capable of showing Ralph the amount of affection and care nobody has ever shown him before.
• Joke Exhaustion: Vanellope thinks the game Hero's Duty sounds like "Hero's Doody" and launches into a series of toilet jokes about it. Ralph is not amused. Before dropping the subject, she cheerfully begs him to let her get "one more!" joke in before stopping.
• Just in Time: Vanellope transports Ralph out of the Collapsing Lair right before he gets crushed by huge piles of mentos.
• Just the First Citizen: Vanellope ends up as this, after renouncing the throne and crown and settling for "president" instead.
• Karmic Death: King Candy/Turbo, who has called himself a boss thanks to the power-up his One-Winged Angel Cy-Bug provides, dies because of the very thing he thought would help him win and continue his mad spree of game-hopping/conquering: Sure, he became one with a virus... a virus programmed to be drawn into the destructive beacon. So he's dragged into it, unable to escape... and fully aware the whole time.
• Kid Hero: Vanellope starts off as a Bratty Half-Pint, evolves into a Damsel in Distress, and eventually earns her hero stripes at the climax.
• Kids Are Cruel: The racers in Sugar Rush are just plain beastly to Vanellope, who acts like a jerk to Ralph (initially). However, this example is more complicated than most, as the other racers' cruelty wasn't really their doing; King Candy/Turbo messed with their programming code so they forgot who Vanellope was. They're very sorry when they find out.
• Killed Off for Real:
  • Sonic's in-universe Public Service Announcement explains the rules:
    Sonic: If you die outside your own game, you won't regenerate. Ever. Game Over.
  • This lends weight to the characters' actions through most of the film, as they spend the majority of it in Sugar Rush, where only Vanellope is a native. It finally happens to King Candy/Turbo, himself an immigrant to Sugar Rush, when he gets sucked into a cola/Mentos eruption by the programming of the Cy-Bug he's merged with.
  • This will also happen, along with a full-on Apocalypse, to whoever didn't make it out when the game's plug is pulled. This becomes a plot point twice because Vanellope cannot leave due to her glitch status.
• Kill Screen: The arcade version of Fix-It Felix has one when you hit 39 levels.There's also The Stinger after the end credits.
• King Koopa Copy: Though more an expy of the original Donkey Kong, Ralph fits into this category, being the stout and short-tempered bad guy from the arcade game Fix-It Felix Jr.
• King Mook: King Cy-Bug, a.k.a. what happens when a Cy-Bug ate King Candy.
• Kitschy Local Commercial: Among the fake advertisements Disney used for the movie, one of them is a commercial for The Fix-It Felix Hammer, having shoddy graphics, poor format, and obviously-stock pictures and videos.
• Kneel Before Frodo: The other racers are quick to humble themselves after they remember that Vanellope was their princess.
• Kneel Before Zod: Played with. Vanellope gets Ralph to genuflect so she can give him the cookie medal she made for him.
• Konami Code: King Candy uses it to gain access and edit Sugar Rush's source code. It is indeed the code of all codes!
  • It should be pointed out that the code is written on a napkin from Tapper's, implying that King Candy is NOT part of Sugar Rush.
• Ladyella: A minor character from Sugar Rush is called "Citrusella Flugpucker" (it's a bluish recolor of Jubileena Bing-Bing).
• Lady Not-Appearing-in-This-Game: An interesting and actually plot-critical example: Vanellope is featured prominently in the Sugar Rush cabinet art despite that she's supposedly a glitch and allegedly not supposed to even be in the game. This is what clues Ralph in that King Candy's hiding something and ultimately leads to the latter's plan derailing. In the end it actually proves to be a hint to an even bigger reveal: that Vanellope is actually the true ruler of Sugar Rush.
• Lampshade Hanging:
  • "When did video games become so violent and scary?!" When you have Kano in your movie while parodying First-Person Shooter games, anything is possible.
  • There is also one about the player character in first-person shooters and how every body part except the arms is not visible. In Hero's Duty, the player character is just a robot with arms resembling those of the other characters.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: King Candy tampered with the code in Sugar Rush so that no one would remember who Vanellope was by locking everyone's memories up in a chest. Only Sour Bill knows of this incident, which he tells Ralph, but not even he remembers Vanellope's true identity.
• Laser Sight: During her programmed backstory, a bug crashed through the window of the church on Calhoun's wedding and ate her to-be husband. When she marries Felix in an identical church, there's dozens of Red Dots on the window from the rifles of all of Calhoun's guests making sure nothing like that happens again.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler: The official tie-in video games and coloring book came out before the film's debut. Both contain massive spoilers.
• Lava is Boiling Kool-Aid: Almost literally in this case ^note Key word: almost. That stuff ain't Kool-Aid, it's Diet Cola. While the main point was the drink's eruptive nature when it reacts with Mentos (Truth in Television due to their particular chemistry), the "molten hot Diet Cola" found in the volcano is also a likely shout-out to this video game trope, especially games like Mega Man 3 and Super Metroid.
• Lawyer-Friendly Cameo:
  • Kano, of Mortal Kombat: he is never acknowledged by name onscreen, and in the script he is referred to as "Cy-borg". Though permission was gotten, one theory is that the name and character was PG-ified to avoid connecting the kid-friendly movie with a game whose basic principle is inflicting massive bodily harm. Most people familiar with the game would still be able to tell who he is, though (despite him having a cybernetic arm which Kano doesn't have).
  • Mario is referred to only by name and never makes an appearance. John C. Reilly made a joke that the film couldn't afford to pay for the rights, but the filmmakers actually did have permission to use him^note Bowser and a Super Mushroom do appear, at least, and Nintendo is properly acknowledged in the credits — they just couldn't figure out a way to fit him into the story (and, given Mario's iconic status, they felt a cameo appearance wouldn't do him justice).
• Left the Background Music On: Felix has just rescued Calhoun from a NesquikSand pit, and romantic music plays in the background as Calhoun gets all doe-eyed. Then the camera pans slightly to reveal that the Laffy Taffies are providing the music and have surrounded them in the shape of a heart. Calhoun fires a few warning shots into the air to get them to knock it off.
• Leitmotif:
  • Turbo has a theme of his own — a very dark version of the first few notes of his old arcade game Turbo Time's theme. However, it is limited to very specific scenes due to him not appearing much in the movie, as himself anyway. It's most prominent in the climax.
  • Vanellope has one as well: a descending melody that is played either whimsically or mournfully depending on the scene.
  • Ralph's theme is the most blatant, playing as the title of the movie comes up and prominently throughout the following scene. It tends to appear in more sentimental moments, including his attempted Heroic Sacrifice.
  • King Candy has a theme as well, a song that's actually a version of the Turbo Time version with a bar removed on every chord, possibly inspired by The Wizard of Oz. Since King Candy is actually an alias of Turbo, he has two letimotifs.
• Level Ate: The Sugar Rush world is made of candy.
• Let Me Get This Straight...: Ralph, upon learning that Vanellope don't know how to drive a racing car.
  Ralph: let me get this straight; you don't know how to drive.
  Vanellope: Well no, not technically. But I just thought—
  Ralph: What did you think?! "Oh, I'll just magically win the race just because I really want to!"
  Vanellope: Look wise guy, I know I'm a racer. I can feel it in my code.
• Let's Get Out of Here: Said by Taffyta when Ralph comes after her group because she pushed Vanellope into the puddle of mud.
• Like Brother and Sister: Word of God says that Ralph and Vanellope are this. It can be seen as a hyperactive little girl badgering her big brother to play with her because she likes spending time with and annoying him and him indulging her because he likes to spend time with her as well even if he is annoyed by her brattish behaviors (like mimicking him). The Volleying Insults is certainly sibling like.
• Lightning Bruiser:
  • Ralph has a rather impressive running speed for someone his size, and is capable of punching things so fast that his arms blur, and he's able to pulverize stone into dust in less than a second. He does this in one scene to make a bed out of the bricks in the dump, and later to make a training race course for Vanellope.
  • In the climax, King Candy in his Cy-Bug form, despite being over twenty feet tall (and strong enough to toss Ralph around like a rag doll), can still move pretty damn fast.
• The Little Detecto: Calhoun's hand-held Cy-Bug detector.
• Logo Joke:
  • The Walt Disney Animation Studios logo is rendered in 8-Bit graphics, with an 8-bit composition of "Steamboat Willie".
  • The Disney logo used in The Stinger is a Kill Screen variation.
• Loads and Loads of Characters: This film has the most characters ever in a Disney film, with a whopping 188 different character models.
• Lonely at the Top: Once Ralph gets his medal and returns to the Fix-It Felix game, he finds the building is deserted, except for Gene the bartender, who tells Ralph that the game is about to be unplugged and allows Ralph to live in the penthouse before giving him an epic "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
  Gene: Well, you actually went and did it.
  Ralph: Gene, where is everybody?
  Gene: They're gone. After Felix went looking for you and didn't come back, everyone panicked and abandoned ship.
  Ralph: But I'm here now!
  Gene: It's too late, Ralph. Litwak's pulling our plug in the morning. But, never let it be said that I'm not a man of my word. The place is yours, Ralph. Enjoy.
  Ralph: Gene, wait! I didn't want any of this to happen...
  Gene: Well, what did you want, Ralph?
  Ralph: I don't know! I was just sick of living alone in the garbage!
  Gene: Well, now you can live alone in the penthouse.
• Losing Horns: Sounds off once Vanellope's new car gets finished baking... after Ralph accidentally destroys the minigame and spilled every ingredient onto it.
• Love at First Punch: Felix gets googly eyes at Calhoun immediately after she decks him.
• Love at First Sight: Felix becomes enamored with Calhoun as soon as he gets a good look at her "high definition".

Tropes M to P

• MacGuffin: The Hero's Duty Medal is the initial catalyst to the movie's plot and possession of it drives a significant chunk of the conflict. It represents Ralph's shallow wish for fulfillment of his desires, but ultimately proves to be an illusion, a lie which causes great damage to be done both to Ralph's own game and to all the games he's visited. It is only after Ralph rejects that lie (i.e. throwing it against the game screen) that he discovers King Candy's deception (the "Out Of Order" sign taped on the other side of the screen falls off and reveals Vanellope is on the side of the Sugar Rush cabinet. At this point, it ceases to be relevant and is never seen again.) and the way to correct his mistakes and become the person he truly wants to be.
• Made of Indestructium: Vanellope claims that the jawbreakers found in Sugar Rush are this, so she's quite impressed (and inspired) when Ralph manages to split one in half; if he can break that, an armored vault door would be no match for him!
• Made of Iron: Ralph can be thrown several stories from the roof of an apartment building, slam face first into a concrete floor, and he'll still be ready to tear some more stuff up in the next level.
• Madness Mantra: "We are humanity's last hope... our mission, destroy all Cy-Bugs... we are humanity's last hope... our mission, destroy all Cy-Bugs."
• Magic Countdown: The one-minute countdown for the Build-a-Kart Minigame actually lasts 1 minute 14 seconds.
• Magic Skirt: Vanellope hangs upside down from a tree branch and her skirt remains static. Justified in that it's made of paper candy cups.
• Market-Based Title: In Japan, the film is called Sugar Rush.
• Mascot Racer: Sugar Rush is a food-based kart racing game.
• Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy: Calhoun and Felix; the former is a harden military veteran with no use for tender feelings while the former is a sensitive and soft-spoken repairman.
• Massive Multiplayer Crossover: Arcade machine characters regularly visit other machines and interact on a daily basis. Characters are advised to be careful when doing this since dying outside of one's own arcade machine is a permanent death. In a slightly meta example, Fix-It Felix Jr. becomes host to various arcade characters out of a job after the events of the film, making it popular in the arcade by players who think it's a retro throwback to old arcade games.
• May–December Romance: Played With. While they both appear as adults around the same age, Felix has been around for 30 years and Calhoun has only existed for one week, being from different gaming eras (8-Bit vs. High-Def).
• Mean Character, Nice Actor:
  • In his game, Ralph is a hulking, raging brute that fully intends to smash the building full of innocent tenants. When the game isn't being played, he is a Gentle Giant who appears to have a friendly, professional relationship with the other video game characters.
  • The same can be said about the cameo villains. They're all nice guys, they just have to play the part they're in. Especially M. Bison and Kano.
• Meaningful Echo: See the Bad Anon Affirmation; Ralph recites it in the climax because he has come to believe it.
• Meaningful Name:
  • Tobikomi, the developer of the film's Original Generation games, is Japanese for "jump into", tying well into the game-jumping its characters embark upon.
  • Wreck-It Ralph wrecks things.
  • Fix-It Felix fixes things.
  • Turbo was a race car driver.
  • Each of the racers in Sugar Rush have one.
  • Sour Bill is sour, as in grumpy.
  • King Candy is the ruler of Sugar Rush a candy-themed environment. He's actually Turbo.
  • Vanellope Von Schweetz: Both names are a play on types of candy as well as Foreshadowing that she's actually of royalty and the rightful ruler of Sugar Rush.
  • Tamora J. Calhoun's name is a parody of infamous female characters in similar-themed gaming genres. See the Shout-Out tab.
• Medium Awareness: 99% of the video game characters know they are video game characters. The plot hinges upon this, and the 1% who don't know.
• Medium Blending: The film is mainly in 3D, but the parts that use 2D sprites are well integrated into it. Even the NPCs of Fix-It Felix, Jr. always move in their 8-bit animation loops, no matter how they're rendered (Ralph and Felix only ever move in their 8-bit loops during gameplay; outside of gameplay, they move around like normal people).
• Metaphorgotten: At several points in the story, Calhoun's dialogue becomes a mish-mash of metaphors and figures of speech. Here's but one example:
  Calhoun: The selfish man is like a mangy dog chasing a cautionary tale.
• Mid-Air Bobbing: At the Bad-Anon meeting, Clyde the Ghost floats up-and-down or left-and-right (above a chair) with the typical pace for his game.
• Mike Nelson, Destroyer of Worlds: Ralph manages to avoid destroying any worlds, but it's a very close thing. Especially after bringing that Cy-Bug into Sugar Rush.
• Milestone Celebration:
  • In-universe. The movie begins on Fix-It Felix Jr.'s 30^th anniversary.
  • Perhaps coincidental, but Q*bert's cameo appearance in Wreck-It Ralph also coincides with the aforementioned character's 30^th anniversary.
• Mind-Control Eyes: When the beacon is lit, the Cy-Bug's and Virus King Candy's eyes change from green to blue.
• The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body: It's not entirely clear who is in control after Turbo is eaten and assimilated by a Cy-Bug... his personality and mannerisms remain intact, but he can't resist the hypnotic call of a gigantic light beacon — in this case a fiery volcano eruption — which spells his ultimate doom.
• Minigame: In an in-universe example, the car-making factory from Sugar Rush.
• A Mistake Is Born: When Taffyta Muttonfudge encounters Vanellope and mocks her glitching, she tells her:
  Taffyta: You're an accident just waiting to happen.
• Mood Whiplash:
  • Halfway through the second trailer we cut from Vanellope spouting Toilet Humor about the name Hero's Duty to an incredibly sad and intense montage set to "Some Nights". The next lines? Ralph being told that "we can't change who we are" and Vanellope lamenting that everyone says she's just a mistake. And that's just the trailer.
  • The Toilet Humor scene happens mere seconds after Vanellope was face down in the mud crying over being bullied and having her pedal car smashed up by the other kids.
• Moral Dissonance: Vanellope's lack of caring if her "glitching" gets Sugar Rush unplugged if she races as this. It could follow this was a knee-jerk reaction to a) getting that close to living her dream as a racer, and b) feeling that Ralph double-crossed her for talking with King Candy.
• Mouth Cam: Used as Ralph interrogates Sour Bill, by threatening to eat him.
• Mr. Exposition:
  • In an odd, non-verbal sort of way. The girl with the glasses is able to provide the audience with information they'll need by playing Hero's Duty (which starts Ralph on the game campaign and gets some rules of video games explained to him), then dropping by Sugar Rush and being turned away, and then going to Fix-It Felix, Jr. to discover Ralph isn't there.
  • Done later with Felix when he has to explain what "Going Turbo" means to Calhoun. Here, it's justified because Calhoun comes from Hero's Duty and was only plugged in the past few days, which also shows what's at stake if he doesn't get Ralph back.
• Mr Fix It: He's not called "Fix-It Felix Jr." for nothing. He can fix literally anything that he can whack with his hammer.
• Mugged for Disguise: Ralph needs to get into Hero's Duty to earn a medal, but since Ralph isn't really a bad guy, the space marine helpfully knocks himself out so Ralph can mug him without resistance. Of course, considering his mental state and level of intoxication Ralph may have been doing him a favor. Stealing his underwear and putting him in Zangief's briefs probably wasn't necessary, though.
• Multilingual Song: "Sugar Rush", the theme-song for the in-universe video game of the same name, contains lyrics in both Japanese and English, fitting for the game's Japanese origins.
• Mundane Made Awesome: The super big and high-tech "beacon" is a glorified bugzapper.
• My God, What Have I Done?:
  • When the characters of Sugar Rush realize who Vanellope really is, everyone panics, especially the other racers. Of course, they never realized the truth since their code had been manipulated by King Candy/Turbo.
  • Ralph gets this threefold, first for crushing Vanellope's car into bits (even though he believes it is for the greater good, it's obvious he still feels this after the deed is done), seeing what his actions have wrought to his own game for running off, and finally when he realizes the Cy-Bug invasion of Sugar Rush was his fault.
  • Another character as well — while Felix is upset with Ralph only because the latter game-jumped, he didn't realize just how badly the others in Fix-It Felix Jr. treated Ralph until Ralph compared said treatment with the treatment Felix got in prison. In this case, though, it was more guilt for not stopping others from treating Ralph badly, rather than Felix feeling bad for his own treatment of Ralph, who he at least tried to treat fairly, his reluctance owed to the Nicelanders' fear and loathing of Ralph.
• My New Gift Is Lame: Subverted. Vanellope seems to be staring in disappointed shock at the car Ralph helped her bake, enough so that Ralph starts to apologize for screwing it up. Then she interrupts him by screaming "I love it, IloveitIloveitIloveit!" She was just overwhelmed to have a real car at all — all she had before was a pedal-powered box car made of wafers.
• Near-Villain Victory: Turbo's scheme almost succeeds to the point where he shouts "Game Over for both of you" — then Ralph decides to commit a Heroic Sacrifice and destroy the evil lair which in turn activates Vanellope's Heroic Resolve.
• Necessarily Evil: Video game villains are just playing the role of their game's Bad Guy opposing the hero (or player) because the game requires an antagonist, even if the villain-actors themselves are perfectly kind, noble, and reasonable people.
• Never Heard That One Before: The deadpan Mr. Surge Protector doesn't miss a beat when giving Ralph a security check.
  Mr. Surge Protector: Anything to declare?
  Ralph: I hate you.
  Mr. Surge Protector: I get that a lot.
• Never Say "Die": Averted in the original as King Candy uses both "kill" and "die" in the climax. However in some dubs, like the Norwegian, his lines were changed from "...it'd be more fun to kill you" and "Let's watch her die together, shall we?" to "...it'd be more fun to get rid of you" and "Let's watch her disappear together."
• Never Trust a Trailer: In the trailer, there's a marine in Hero's Duty that tells Ralph "Get out of this game buddy!". In the movie, none of the marines or Sgt. Calhoun know that Ralph is in Hero's Duty (they think it's Markowski, the marine that Ralph saw at Tapper) until Felix comes in and tells them about Ralph appearing.
• Nice Character, Mean Actor:
  • In their game, the Nicelanders are the residents in distress in the penthouse that Ralph intends to destroy. When the game isn't being played, they act as snobby Jerkasses towards Ralph, especially Gene.
  • Subverted by Felix, who despite the main character of the film being the embodiment of Mean Character, Nice Actor, is actually the only character in their game who is nice and respectful to Ralph.
• Nice Guy: Felix is polite and respectful to everyone he meets, including Ralph.
• Nice Hat: Most Sugar Rush racers have some outlandish sweets-themed hats or headgear.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!:
  • Played straight twice with Ralph, whose antics nearly doom two games, and the consequences of these acts threaten the entire arcade.
  • Played with with Felix. His attempts to escape from prison by hitting a damaged bar with his hammer go about as well as you'd expect from a character called Fix-It Felix Jr. who is armed with a hammer that fixes things by magic. Nice job fixing it, hero.
    Felix: Why do I fix everything I touch?!"
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain!:
  • Both subverted and played straight in the fact that Ralph ends up saving the day in the end, yet he is still considered the "villain".
  • King Candy, when he does not give Ralph back his medal when Ralph first meets him. Had King Candy just simply given Ralph his medal, then Ralph would have left the game and he would have never been discovered as Turbo. Not to mention that as said medal was Vannelope's entry fee into the roster race, it would have disqualified her.
  • Similarly, had the bully racers of Sugar Rush not broken Vanellope's original pedal-powered kart, she wouldn't have gotten her new, real racing kart and thus might not have won or even completed the race.
  • Another example, is the reveal of King Candy/Turbo attempting to have Vanellope deleted through his hacking which subsequently resulted her in becoming a glitch. Thus giving her new glitchy abilities, which she learns to control later on to her advantage.
• The Nicknamer: Vanellope, as seen under Big Stupid Doo Doo Head, refers to Ralph as "Knuckles" at one point on account of his big hands. Her favorite nickname for him appears to be "Stinkbrain".
• Nightmare Face: Turbo/King Candy, when he starts glitching out while attacking Vanellope. His face flickers back and forth between his King Candy disguise, his rendered Turbo face, and his utterly terrifying skull-like 8-bit Turbo face, while red glitch lines flicker throughout his body. It doesn't help that some of the glitching reveals him in 3D 8-bit, so his face looks like it's made up entirely of tiny blocks, instead of just squares. Combined with his murderous expression, it's damn creepy.
• No Fourth Wall: The characters don't know they're in a movie, but 99% of them are aware that they're characters in video games. The 1% that doesn't is accurately described thus:
  Calhoun: Cy-Bugs are like a virus. They don't know they're in a game. All they know is eat, kill, multiply.
• No One Gets Left Behind: During the Darkest Hour, when Sugar Rush falls to the Cy-Bugs and everyone is trying to escape, Vanellope is found unable to leave the game environment because of her glitching. She remarks I Will Only Slow You Down which only spurs Ralph to attempt a Heroic Sacrifice to save Sugar Rush and Vanellope. Calhoun and Felix likewise stay with her to buy Ralph time.
• No, You: Ralph inverts this trope when he is about to sacrifice himself.
  King Candy/Turbo: It's Game Over for both of you! [meaning Ralph and Vanellope]
  Ralph: No. Just for me.
• Noble Demon:
  • Zangief tries to explain this to the members of Bad-Anon. "You may be Bad Guy, but this does not mean you're bad guy."
  • The Zombie as well. "Zangief say, labels not make you happy. Good? Bad? *groans* You must love you."
• Nobody Poops: Averted in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it gag. As Ralph is leaving Pac-Man a couple of restrooms can be seen near the exit.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: King Candy looks and sounds a lot like old-time comedian/actor Ed Wynn. (Who, perhaps not-so-coincidentally, was involved in several Disney projects in the '50s and '60s. Wynn's portrayal of the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland, in particular, appears to have been a strong influence on King Candy's characterization.)
• No Name Given: The planet where Hero's Duty takes place. The intro even says "On a planet with no name...".
• Non-Indicative Name: In a bunch of cute kids with sweets-based names and theming, one would expect the one called Minty Zaki to have, well, a mint theme. Turns out that her theme is sour apple instead.
• Non-Standard Character Design:
  • Sgt. Calhoun has the most realistic design of the four main characters, who are very cartoony. This is in keeping with the design of the NPCs from Hero's Duty, which is also more realistic than the others.
  • In addition, the designs of Ralph and Felix differ from Vanellope in that Ralph, Felix and anyone from their game have five fingers when Vanellope and anyone from her game have four. This is also in keeping with the design of the game Ralph and Felix come from, being an '80s Japanese-made arcade game.
  • Inside Sugar Rush, King Candy is a beady-eyed old man in a game of anime-eyed children and sentient candy. This is the first visible clue that he isn't supposed to be there.
• No Ontological Inertia: Justified. Once Vanellope crosses the finish line and gets transformed into a princess, the land resets back to what it was before the Cy-Bugs turned it into a wasteland.
• Not Good with Rejection: The plot of Turbo's backstory is him crashing a rival's game when it became more popular than his own.
• The Not-Love Interest: Vanellope for Ralph. A lot of people who only saw her character design thought she was an extremely short adult (since when it comes to video game character designs, anything goes) and assumed she was the Love Interest (an online preview with multiple factual errors didn't help matters). She is supposed to be nine years old and is definitely not Ralph's Love Interest, although she and Ralph do become best friends.
• Not Quite Dead: Turbo and a Cy-Bug hide in Sugar Rush when others presume them to be dead. They come back in a big way later.
• Not So Different: Ralph and Vanellope are both outcasts in their game and seek better lives through winning competitions (medals and races, respectively). Sarah Silverman invokes this trope by name in Disney's "Meet the Cast of Wreck-It Ralph" clip.
• Oblivious Guilt Slinging:
  • Ralph intentionally does this to get Felix to invite him into the building for the 30th anniversary party, telling Felix he saw some kind of "explosions" over the building and wanted to make sure everyone was okay, until Felix fesses up and admits they're fireworks for the party that Ralph wasn't invited to.
  • Ralph was already having mixed feelings about destroying the kart, but Vanellope giving him a cookie medal that said "You're my hero" made it even more difficult. Ouch.
• Odd Couple: Felix and Calhoun, the repairman and the military veteran. Admit it, you never saw it coming.
• Odd Name Out: Most of the Sugar Rush characters have cutesy and punny names, but then there's Candlehead...^{Production note} According to certain compelling evidence, it seems that Candlehead was originally intended to be Minty Zaki... but for unknown reasons, the name was instead given to a sour-apple-candy themed racer (originally named "Emmareld") at the last minute. and, of course, King Candy's name is noticeably simple for a game where everyone else has bizarrely fanciful names. Yet another clue to his true identity.
• Official Couple: Felix and Calhoun marry in the epilogue.
• Oh, Crap!: Too many to count, but here's a few.
  • Felix and the Nicelanders when Mr. Litwak puts up the "Out of Order" sign on their game.
    Big Gene: Ladies and gentlemen, we're out of order!
  • Ralph just beforea baby Cy-Bug attacks him and makes him launch himself out of an escape pod. Not to mention when he first sees the action in Hero's Duty.
  • Vanellope when she crashes her car into stalactites made out of Mentos... in Diet Cola Mountain.
  • Felix has the most of these, from having pieces of ceiling fall on top of him that send him through his death animation to being shot at with machine guns outside of his game.
  • Calhoun has a big one when she finally finds the Cy-Bug nest.
    Calhoun: Doomsday and Armageddon just had a baby, and it is ugly!
  • A smaller but just as pronounced one when the Cy-Bug initially escapes. All she does is stare wide-eyed and run her hands through her hair, in one of the only times we see her scared in the entire movie.
  • King Candy when he sees Vanellope racing alongside him. Considering we know his scheme at this point, it's justified.
  • Near the end, all the Sugar Rush Racers got one when Princess (later, President) Vanellope joked that they were going to be executed.
    Calhoun: Oh, this place just got interesting.
  • Ralph and Felix share one after seeing Vanellope's glitching reveal King Candy's true identity: Turbo.
• Ominous Visual Glitch:
  • Vanellope gets pixelated during her glitching fits caused by King Candy rearranging the game's code to make himself the main character instead of her. She also sometimes causes anyone in contact with her to glitch; this is used to create the big reveal that King Candy is actually Turbo.
  • The end title card glitches in a parody of the Pac-Man "kill stage". The same is done with the end of the Bit by Bit making-of documentary on the Blu-Ray.
• One-Hit-Point Wonder: Felix is one of these in his own game, as a few loose ceiling tiles is all it takes for him to go through his death animation (and instantly resurrect seconds later). Thankfully, he can take a lot more serious harm when he's in other games (necessary for the escape from the NesquikSand).
• One-Winged Angel: Turbo/King Candy is eaten by a Cy-Bug and it mutates into a monstrous version of him. This sets up the "boss level" for the movie's climax.
• Opening Narration: Played with. At first, it appears that Ralph is giving one, but then it's revealed that he's doing a share at the Bad-Anon meeting.
• Original Generation: Fix-It Felix Jr., Sugar Rush, Hero's Duty and Turbo Time as well as their respective characters.
• Our Doors Are Different: King Candy's safe, which holds the source code for Sugar Rush, is secured with a Nintendo Entertainment System controller. In order to access it, King Candy uses the Konami Code.
• Outside-Context Problem:
  • Any character who game hops into another game falls into this. Ralph is completely out of context for the people in Sugar Rush since all the characters, save for King Candy, are cute anime girls/boys, while he's a big brute able to shatter jawbreakers, something that is thought to be impossible. Vanellope is quick to take advantage of this.
  • The Cy-Bugs that infects Sugar Rush. Since there is no beacon to keep them under control like in Hero's Duty, they breed like crazy and eat the game from the inside out. They threaten to do the same to the entire arcade if they escape Sugar Rush.
• Pacifist Run: In-universe example — Ralph climbs the tower in Hero's Duty and grabs the medal while no-one's playing it so he wouldn't have to fight a single bug.
• Pac-Man Fever: Despite taking place in an arcade, they seem to be consciously averting it, presenting games from different eras (albeit fictional ones) and even having actual characters from different games à la Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Notably, Bowser and Eggman actually resemble their official artwork with stunning faithfulness.
• Palette Swap: The film used this for several of the background Sugar Rush racers. This is both meta and in-game. Of course, when you have a racing game featuring Loads and Loads of Characters, and especially one from 1997, this is to be expected.
• Parental Bonus: By the very nature of this movie, it's crammed to the gunwales with video-game references that nobody under 30 who isn't a gaming history buff is likely to get. Most people have at least heard of Pac-Man, but Dig Dug? Qix? Pong?
• Peek-a-Bangs: Calhoun's hair, surprising for a marine, giving how she needs to see everything around her. Perhaps it refers to her guarded personality.
• People Puppets: When Fix-It Felix Jr. is actually being played, Felix is technically a slave who obeys the player's controls. The same could very well be said for any character that is directly controlled by a player, such as the First-Person Shooter robot in Hero's Duty, and presumably the player's kart in Sugar Rush. It is also inverted when Felix moves on his own during game time; the controls on the arcade console move by themselves.
• Percussive Maintenance:
  • Felix's magic hammer fixes things by hitting them (which makes sense in his game). As it turns out, it can fix anything (including healing himself), and even if he's trying to smash his way out of a jail, his hammer will make the bars stronger.
  • Calhoun frequently shakes and hits the motion-detector she's using to track Cy-Bugs, as it has trouble functioning through all the sweets that constitues Sugar Rush's landscape. It doesn't do much good, though.
• Person as Verb: Felix explains what "going Turbo" is and why it's so dangerous: It was named for Turbo the racer, a protagonist who, out of jealousy, jumped into a newer racing game to upstage it. Which caused both games to glitch up, resulting in the unplugging and removal of both from the arcade.
• Pet the Dog: Ralph's giving the cherry away solidifies his good-person credentials.
• Pimped-Out Dress:
  • Vanellope's princess dress. It is very pink and frilly with a high white collar and lacy sleeves, and it's obvious Vanellope isn't a fan. She has it on again at Felix and Calhoun's wedding. It's apparently tight around the collar.
  • Calhoun's dress (which seems to be the same for both weddings) is pretty stunning.
• Pint-Sized Kid: All the characters from Sugar Rush apply, with the exception of King Candy.
• Pitbull Dates Puppy: Felix is very sweet and gentle while Calhoun is serious and tough.
• Play Every Day: Sugar Rush has a feature where the character roster changes daily, determined in the game's world by nightly races. Vanellope is prevented from getting on the roster because she has no coins from previous races to pay her way in, only to finally have a chance by using Ralph's medal as a substitute coin.
• Please Don't Leave Me: Vanellope hugs Ralph at the end and tearfully tells him he could stay in Sugar Rush if he wants to.
• Plot-Mandated Friendship Failure: When Ralph destroys Vanellope's kart. Only after he realizes that King Candy played him like a violin does Ralph make amends with Vanellope.

• Police Brutality: Played for laughs. Two cops, depicted as donuts, beat Ralph (literally sugarcoated) in Sugar Rush with their batons.

• Portmanteau: Several of the Sugar Rush Racers' names are a combination of actual names and sweet treats. Here are some examples:
  • Vanellope = Penelope + Vanilla
  • Taffyta = Tabitha + Taffy
  • Rancis = Francis + Reese's Peanut Butter Cups
• The Power of Hate: Calhoun seems to run on this early in the film. Her whole life is about killing the Cy-Bugs that killed her fiancé.
• Power-Up: In-universe examples include pies for Fix-It Felix Jr. (which apparently render Felix invincible) and the insane candy-flavored weapons in Sugar Rush's kart races.
• Princesses Rule: This was the original plan for Vanellope in Sugar Rush. It was not supposed to have a king or a queen, just her.
• Princess in Rags: Vanellope is revealed to be this, as she was the rightful ruler of Sugar Rush before Turbo deposed her and made her live like a "homeless lady" in a cave.
• Product Placement:
  • The various licensed game characters don't really count, since that's what the movie's world is about; but Sugar Rush has lots of placement, notably Mentos, NesquikSand, and Laffy Taffy. One product notable by its absence is Diet Coke, as the game/movie calls it "diet cola" instead.
  • The scene where the donut cops Wynchell and Duncan deploy the Devil Dogs to search for Ralph is the point where they lose all attempts at subtlety.
  • The Subway cup in the arcade had more than its fair share of screen time.
  • King Candy's guards are Oreos who chant "Oooor-REE-oooh. OOO-REEEEEEEEEEEEE-oh."
  • One of the racers, Rancis Fluggerbutter, has a Reese's Peanut-butter Cup theme with his clothing and his car.
  • Beard Papa's is an actual Cream Puff brand. With said character as their real-life mascot, and in Sugar Rush, as the guard of the Kart Bakery.
• Progressive Era Montage: In the opening scene which speeds up 30 years from The '80s until The Present Day as evidenced by the change of videogame platforms.
• Protagonist Title: Ralph is the protagonist of the movie, but not of the fictional video game within his movie. Both titles are Protagonist Titles, so that Ralph has the movie named after him but lives his life in a world named after his opponent Fix-It Felix Jr.
• Psychotic Smirk: Sergeant Calhoun sports one when Vanellope, restored to her true power as princess, orders all her bullies to be executed. She is, of course, joking.
  Calhoun: Ohh, this place just got interesting.
• Pun:
  • The tram from Pac-Man to Game Central Station is called the "Pac-Manorail."
  • Sugar Rush is full of them. From the NesquikSand to the vines of Laffy Taffy, which is attracted to anything they find amusing.
  • When King Candy is shot with frosting and is asked if he's hurt, his response? "No, he just glazed me!"
  • Ralph telling Sour Bill to stick around after he attaches him to a flower full of sticky caramel.
  • The "Fungeon". King Candy also attempts to explain it. The cells aren't even fun; Felix's is plain blank and Vanellope's is actually a really horrific, Monster Clown-abundant, Circus of Fear-esque one. Remember, this is for children.
  • Vanellope stating that she has "pixlexia"^note dyslexia.
  • The "Sweet Seeker" power-up.
• Punch-Clock Villain:
  • How the video game baddies are portrayed; being the villain is their job. Off-duty, they're not all that bad.
  • An in-universe example is Sour Bill, who knows that King Candy had some real dirt on his hands (although he doesn't remember the details), but still serves him unquestionably until Ralph starts interrogating him for answers, and his memories are refreshed at the threat of being licked and devoured by Ralph.
• Punny Name:
  • Wynchell and Duncan, the donut cops, are named after donut chains.
  • On a different note, Minty Zaki sounds a lot like "Miyazaki" (this was intentional) and DiCaramello, if you pronounce the "caramel" part as "carmel", sounds like "DiCaprio".
• Pyrrhic Victory: Ralph goes home with his medal, but it's not everything he thought it would be. He had to break a little girl's heart and his game is due to be unplugged, causing him to chuck the medal at the screen in disgust. Fortunately, the impact knocks the "Out of Order" sign loose and shows him how he can really be a hero.

Tropes Q to T

• Quicksand Sucks: The NesquikSand in Sugar Rush.
  Felix: I almost drowned in chocolate milk mix!
• Race Lift: For the Japanese version, Minty Zaki, an Ambiguously Brown girl dressed in green, has been redesigned into a Japanese character resembling Candlehead, only wearing a pink kimono and with her hair done up in a bun. She is referred to as Minty Sakura in this incarnation.
• Ramp Jump: Vanellope is seen jumping a large gap with her kart.
• Rapid-Fire Fisticuffs: Ralph can punch incredibly fast. He uses this to pave through stuff. Vanellope seems to have picked it up — she can be seen doing it to the Street Fighter II bonus car, in the ending. It's not nearly as effective as Ralph's, obviously.
• Real Men Wear Pink: Played for laughs when Ralph first enters the palace:
  Ralph: I see you're a fan of pink.
  King Candy: Salmon! Salmon, that's obviously salm... What are you doing here?
• Reality Ensues:
  • Ralph tries to earn a medal in Hero's Duty, but being a soldier for a few minutes horrifies him to the point where he begs the player to let him escape. He may have Super Strength and destroy buildings for a living, but the amount of violence he sees in the E-rated game that he comes from is nothing compared to that of a first-person shooting game.
  • As a result of Ralph's actions, the Fix It Felix game is no longer working properly which means it will be unplugged.
• Real Trailer, Fake Movie:
  • Or Fake Game — there are trailers for the games of Hero's Duty, Sugar Rush, and Fix-It Felix Jr.
  • While there aren't arcade machines for the games, Disney placed browser versions of each of the games on the movie website and the Disney.com games section.
  • Now completely averted with Fix-it Felix Jr., which has its very own real machine(s) at Disney's theme parks.
• Real Person Cameo: An unusual and ingenious case is with marine Markowski in the Polish dub version. Markowski is voiced by the lead singer of the legendary rock band named Perfect. The real name of the singer is Grzegorz Markowski.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Gene delivers one to Ralph when he returns with the medallion just as the Fix-It Felix game is about to be unplugged:
  Ralph: Gene, where is everybody?
  Gene: They're gone. After Felix went looking for you and didn't come back, everyone panicked and abandoned ship.
  Ralph: But I'm here now!
  Gene: It's too late, Ralph. Litwak's pulling our plug in the morning. But, never let it be said that I'm not a man of my word. The place is yours, Ralph. Enjoy.
  Ralph: Gene, wait! I didn't want any of this to happen...
  Gene: Well, what did you want, Ralph?
  Ralph: I don't know! I was just sick of living alone in the garbage!
  Gene: Well, now you can live alone in the penthouse.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: At times, King Candy is this — if a bit loony — approaching Ralph and pleading with him, explaining why Vanellope cannot enter the race because of the damage it would ultimately do to the game and Vanellope herself, namely, players seeing Vanellope glitching would have the arcade decommission their otherwise perfectly working machine. He has ulterior motives for not wanting her to race.
• Red Herring: M. Bison is the first character to ask Ralph if he's "going Turbo". This makes it look like he's referring to the "Turbo" update for Street Fighter II, but he's referring to a game character who abandoned his game, and who later turns out to be the main villain.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Ralph and Felix respectively. Passionate and mellow, implusive and long-term thinking, their clothes are even Color-Coded for Your Convenience.
• Red Sky, Take Warning:
  • The "Out of Order" sign paints everything in Niceland tints of yellow and red.
  • The sky of Sugar Rush turns incarnadine after the Cy-Bugs have caused enough havoc.
• Reed Snorkel:
  • Using one (made out of cookie) in Sugar Rush hides Ralph from the Devil Dogs (and gives him Vader Breath).
  • It's also implied that the cy-bug survived the swamp this way.
• Reference Overdosed: In addition to all the game references, there are even more shout-outs to other works.
• Reset Button: All the damage caused by Turbo and the Cy-Bugs to Sugar Rush is undone when Vanellope crosses the finish line because the game reset. This action also adds her character to the next day's roster. This also returns everyone's memories that Turbo had locked up — but they remember what they'd done while they were brainwashed. See Ripple Effect-Proof Memory below.
• Restrained Revenge: Princess Vanellope gets revenge on her bullies by sentencing them to execution. Turns out she was kidding.
• Resurrective Immortality: Being video game characters, they can respawn upon death — but as the PSA in Game Central Station notes, this only applies inside their own games. Death is permanent if it happens in another game.
• The Reveal: King Candy is an old character named Turbo who manipulated Sugar Rush's code so that everyone thought that Vanellope, the real ruler of Sugar Rush, was a glitch.
• Rewriting Reality: It's possible to alter games and their inhabitants by messing with the source code. King Candy's plan revolves around this, and Ralph and Felix use this to give Q*bert and his friends a role in their game.
• Retraux:
  • The Fix-It Felix Jr. arcade game is made to look like it was made in the '80s.
  • The teaser poster◊ is simply an 8-bit sprite of Ralph's head. They sure are banking on nostalgia.
  • This whole film is filled with it, almost to the point of TRON: Legacy.
  • In-universe, the Fix-It Felix Jr. game becomes more popular when characters from the long-abandoned Q*bert game move in and form their own bonus level.
    Ralph: They say we're retro. I think that means "old but cool".
• Rhetorical Question Blunder: When Calhoun asks Felix if he thinks the Cy-Bugs will stop after devouring just one game, he excitedly blurts out "Yes!", forcing Calhoun to explain just how dire the situation is.
• Ride the Lightning: All the characters game-jump by traveling through the power cords. Curiously, they exit through the grounding wire, though stylistically it's probably easier to make a door out of that singular connection than the two thinner prongs. (Nerds take note: there is such a thing as power-line networking, where data really is transmitted through the power cords.)
• Right Out of My Clothes: At the end when Vanellope glitches out of her princess dress.
• Ripple Effect-Proof Memory: When Vanellope crosses the finish line the game resets, reverting all the damage done by the Cy-Bugs. Despite this, everyone still remembers how things were before — no-one's actual memories are reset as you would expect in a resetting computer program in Real Life. This implies that nothing was "removed" but rather their memories were restored and Vanellope was reconnected.
• The Rival: Taffyta Muttonfudge, an accomplished racer at Sugar Rush, is this to Vanellope. This is only because King Candy screwed up everyone's programming code; it's later revealed Taffyta is actually supposed to be one of Vanellope's subjects.
• Roofless Renovation: Ralph breaks the Niceland apartments from above before Felix Jr. fixes them.
• Rule #1: In Hero's Duty, the rule is to never interfere with the first-person shooter.
• Rule of Funny:
  • The double stripe branches don't always vanish immediately when touched — sometimes they wait for the funniest possible moment.
  • The creators admit that this was the whole reason why the idea of pairing Felix and Calhoun up was conceived.
• Running Gag:
  • The double stripe disappearing candy cane branches. This becomes a Plot Point when Calhoun and Felix are dropped into NesquikSand-pit after a double-stripe bridge vanishes beneath their feet.
  • Many of the characters in Sugar Rush mentioning Ralph's bad breath.
  • A very brief one, when Vanellope is learning to drive: Ralph stands in front of the cart and she runs over his foot. Ralph stands behind the cart, and she backs into him and knocks him over — then backs into him again while he's trying to get up. Ralph hides behind a "rock" and she runs into a stalagmite, causing it to break, fall over and whack him on the head.
• Sadistic Choice: King Candy's explanation about the possible unplugging of Sugar Rush — and how Vanellope's nature as a glitch would force her to stay and die with the game — forces Ralph into one of these: let Vanellope race and possibly consign her to a Fate Worse than Death, or save her life by destroying her kart... and her dreams. Ralph, unwilling to lose the only real friend he's ever had, chooses the latter. And the worst thing about it is that's it a lie created by King Candy so Vanellope can remain forever a glitch. Only later does Ralph realize he got played by King Candy and goes on to make amends with Vanellope.
• Sailor Earth: Plenty of fans of the movie have come up with their own Sugar Rush racers.
• Satan is Good: Sure, there's a Satan at the Bad-Anon meeting. That said, he prefers Sah-Teen, he looks at peace with himself, supports his fellow villains at the support group, was one of the people who managed to finally get Ralph into a Bad-Anon meeting, and he's even the first to congratulate Ralph on his 30-year anniversary since release. Like all the other guys in the support group, he's just a Punch-Clock Villain.^note Incidentally, he may be a reference to the old arcade game Satans Hollow; see It Is Pronounced "Tro-PAY" above.
• Say My Name:
  • The first time Ralph actually calls Vanellope by name is when he's quietly pleading with her to listen before she gives him the candy medal.
  • You know the climax has reached the tippy-top when Ralph shouts "Vanellope!" instead of "Kid!"
• Screams Like a Little Girl: Markowski does this when he sees a cockroach. Bonus points for doing this right after declaring that "only the bravest" serve in Calhoun's squad. It's a little understandable once it's shown exactly what kind of "bugs" he faces down in Hero's Duty time and time again.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here!: Ralph leaves his game to win a medal when Gene told him that he'll have to win one to gain their respect. This causes the game to be Out of Order, and thus Felix sets off to find him.
• Second Love: Calhoun's pre-programmed tragic Back Story means that any love will be this.
• Secret Test of Character: When Vanellope is revealed to be the princess, she pretends to issue an execution decree, followed by forgiveness for her rivals to test their reactions
  Taffyta: We are so sorry about the way we treated you!
  Rancis Fluggerbutter: Yeah, those were... jokes!
  Candlehead: I was just doing what Taffyta told me to do!
  Vanellope: Tut, tut. As your merciful princess, I hereby decree that everyone who was ever mean to me shall be... executed.
  Sugar Rush Racers: What? No, no, no, please...
  Fix-it Felix: Oh, my land!
  Sgt. Calhoun: Oh! This place just got interesting.
  Taffyta: [crying] I don't want to die!
  Vanellope: Ah, I'm just kidding.
  Taffyta: You are?
  Vanellope: Stop crying, Taffyta.
• Sequence Break: Ralph skips most of Hero's Duty by ascending the outside of the tower rather than the inside.
• Sequel Hook: To Be Continued, affirmed by Ralph at the end.
• Shabby Heroes, Well-Dressed Villains: The titular character wears a worn shirt and a set of overalls with one strap broken. King Candy is The Dandy and the Big Bad.
• Shaped Like Itself: "It smells like Ralph in here." Also a pun in that "ralph" is another term for vomit, but with that in mind there's a little bit of Fridge Tragedy to this — he's so internalized his status as a social pariah that the word he uses to describe something that smells bad is his own name.
• She Cleans Up Nicely: All four of the main characters do, as shown in Felix and Calhoun's wedding.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran:
  • Markowski of Hero's Duty, whom Ralph mugs for his costume, is suffering from having been forced to participate in a game session for a week.
  • Also Calhoun, whose PTSD trigger is being called "dynamite gal" much like her fiancé used to.
• She's a Man in Japan:
  • The Sugar Rush character "Swizzle Malarkey", who is a male in the original English edition, was given the female name "Savanna Soethekauw" in the Dutch dub of the movie.
  • All three of the male characters in Sugar Rush (Rancis Fluggerbutter, Swizzle Malarkey and Gloyd Orangeboar) were made female in the Russian and Swedish dubs.
• Shipper on Deck:
  • The Laffy Taffy in Sugar Rush are obviously fans of Calhoun×Felix, to the point of forming a heart symbol to frame them in the scene while they serenade the couple. Calhoun scares them off with warning shots.
  • Additionally, the soldiers in Calhoun's platoon seem to approve; they glance and smirk at at each other knowingly during the whole Love at First Punch ordeal in Hero's Duty. Also at the end of the film, during their wedding, her soldiers actively ensure that this wedding is not a repeat of the previous one.
• Ship Tease: The Laffy Taffy and soldiers tease with Felix and Calhoun.
• Shout-Out: As expected by the nature of the movie, it has its own tab.
• Shown Their Work: Plenty. Long story short, out of all the gaming references seen, almost all of them are portrayed perfectly.
  • Zangief's the one exception. His name is pronounced incorrectly (Zan-gi-ev, not Zan-Geef), and putting him in with the villains almost caused a counterattack, as outside of some adaptations, Zangief is one of the series' heroes. Screenwriter Phil Johnston says it's entirely his fault — not because of not doing the research, but because Zangief was a High-Tier Induced Scrappy to Johnston during his Street Fighter II-playing days. "I don't care what anybody says, he was bad to me."
  • Even the titular game is an example. The similarities to Crazy Climber are definitely noticeable even if they were not quite able to get the rights.
  • Ever wondered how Sonic somehow wound up in the arcade? Well, there's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it frame of a very obscure (but indeed real) arcade machine titled Sonic the Fighters (a fighting game with Sonic and the gang) during the evolution of arcade sequence in the beginning. Another rather obscure Sonic game called SegaSonic the Hedgehog was made exclusively for arcades, and predates Fighters, though it is not shown in this movie. Also ties in with Bowser and Eggman in the fact that their home console games also had coin-op ports back in the day. (See here and here). As of 2015, Sonic Dash has also been ported to arcades. As for Sonic the Fighters (or Sonic Championship in Japan), the game is playable on the Nintendo GameCube compilation Sonic Gems Collection and was re-released on Xbox Live and Play Station Network.
  • How did the ! end up in the lost and found? Litwak probably imported it from Japan.
  • Felix's quip about Mario being "fashionably late per the norm" isn't just a reference to Mario not being in the movie — it's also an allusion to how, after Super Mario 64, consoles often didn't get Mario games straight at launch. Also whenever Mario gets an invitation from the Princess, usually concerning a party or cake; the norm is that Bowser kidnaps her shortly before he arrives.
  • Vanellope's kart's Fashionable Asymmetry is given an in-story explanation as Ralph screwed up while baking it; it's also reminiscent of messed-up textures (example◊ from Mario Kart DS) due to, well, glitching.
  • The producers got Buckner and Garcia to do a song about a fictional video game.
  • Sgt. Calhoun is one of the few fictional characters to observe proper gun safety at all times, fittingly for a soldier.
  • The film's creators worked with the actual game devs to get each character just right. For example, the cup of coffee that Bowser drinks is apparently how he canonically has his coffee in his home franchise.
• "Shut Up!" Gunshot: Sgt. Calhoun fires her gun into the air to make the Laffy Taffy vines stop making romantic music and hearts around her and Felix.
• Signature Move: Even after everything is over, Vanellope keeps her glitchy teleporting ability, and Ralph says that the players love it. Given that players can glitch-teleport near the finish line, why wouldn't they?
• Sir Not-Appearing-in-This-Trailer: King Candy appears only very briefly in marketing, with none of his appearances being very expository (whereas a lot of the marketing for the other characters, even the minor ones, explained a great deal). Turbo isn't shown at all in order to protect The Reveal.
• Skull for a Head: Turbo's head is not an actual skull, but he has white skin, yellow teeth, and sunken yellow eyes to invoke a skull. It only further reinforces the fact that he's the Obviously Evil real villain.
• Slapstick: When Felix and Calhoun fall into a pit of NesquikSand, Felix has to get Calhoun to slap him repeatedly (with him always healing himself with his hammer between blows) to get the Laffy Taffies above them to reach down to the point they can grab one to free themselves.
• Slapstick Knows No Gender: Both Ralph and Vanellope get Amusing Injuries during the latter's Training Montage.
• Slow-Motion Fall: During the climax, when Ralph plunges into the stack of Mentos, there is a swift moment of him falling in slow motion, almost like floating in mid-air.
• Slow-Motion Pass-By: Two instances:
  • As the escape pod with Ralph and the Cy-Bug goes past Sergeant Calhoun and Felix. Respectively, Felix sees Ralph and Calhoun sees the Cy-Bug.
  • As Vanellope catches up to King Candy during the roster race, it happens in slo-mo as King Candy lets out a Big "WHAT?!".
• Smooch of Victory: In the Fix-It Felix Jr. game, the Nicelanders reward Felix with a pie, a medal, and a smooch after every level for fixing their apartments. Felix does this to Calhoun after Ralph beats the Cy-Bugs, and she reciprocates with The Big Damn Kiss.
• Soft Water: Towards the end, Ralph and Vanellope plunge into a pool of chocolate from great height without taking any damage.
• Some Kind of Force Field: There's no visible boundary at the entrance/exit of the Sugar Rush game, but when Ralph tries to drag Vanellope past it, a multicolored force field looking somewhat like plastic wrap stops her on the spot, since she's a glitch.
• A Space Marine Is You: In Hero's Duty, since the regular soldiers look like fairly standard sci-fi troopers and is a blatant Shout-Out to Starship Troopers. Ralph takes a stint as one; it isn't as fun as he thought it would be.
• Speech Bubbles: Q*bert talks in these, filled with Grawlix.
• Spit Take: When Ralph says he's tired of being the bad guy, Bowser spits out his coffee (along with some firebreath).

• Standard Snippet: Felix's standard death animation includes a chiptune riff of Chopin's Funeral March.
• Statuesque Stunner: Calhoun is even taller than Ralph, who's supposed to be nine feet tall. See this pic◊ for reference. Of course, Ralph clearly isn't that tall, otherwise he'd dwarf most everyone at the Bad-Anon meeting (though wider, he certainly isn't much taller than they are), making the height discrepancy a technical limitation of his game (hence why Felix is not much taller than Vanellope). Calhoun's own height naturally comes from the high resolution of her game (relative to the small 8-bit characters) and the various characters she draws from, all statuesque themselves.
• Status Quo Is God: A Nicelander landlord tries to invoke this, presumably when Ralph suggests to mix things up in the game so he plays the good guy. Kano even states as such during the Bad Guy meeting ("You can't mess with the program, Ralph."). In the end, Ralph returns to his role as a bad guy, but is happy that he's been the good guy for once (and fixed something, to boot), has earned the respect and generosity of Felix and the Nicelanders, and is able to see Vanellope racing with a player each time a round is completed (a.k.a. when the Nicelanders throw him off the building).
• Stealth Pun:
  • Fix-It Felix Jr. "fixed" Sgt. Calhoun's heart.
  • The film's composer is shown during the credits as the top player on a high score list. He wrote the film's musical score.
  • Game Central Station is an outlet strip. From Radio Shack, no less.
  • The first person to use the phrase "going Turbo" is M. Bison, referencing the second Updated Re-release of Street Fighter II called Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting (and how that word was used in other re-releases and ports, like Super Street Fighter II Turbo).
  • Vanellope threatens to execute characters, which exist as code, after she is restored.
• The Stinger: At the very end of the movie, the Walt Disney logo tuns into a parody of the Pac-Man Kill Screen.
• Stop Copying Me: Ralph gets into one of these with Vanellope which highlights the latter's brattiness (and the in-coming Like Brother and Sister relationship).
• Storyboarding the Apocalypse: As King Candy explains just what would happen if Vanellope's participation got Sugar Rush unplugged, we're shown a vision of her desperately trying to escape as the world disintegrates around her. It's pretty brutal.
• Stylish Protection Gear: Despite using the same color scheme as the other soldiers, Calhoun's armor is closely tailored to her body rather than blocky and shapeless, and she usually doesn't wear a helmet outside of active gameplay. Of course, it's not so stylish that anyone would wear it on a romantic dinner date, to a picnic, etc., as Calhoun and her fiancé are seen doing. Given what happened at the wedding this may be justified.
• Stylistic Suck: The Nicelanders deliberately have animation so choppy they change position in a single frame, representing the way their sprites look while playing their game.
• Sugar Apocalypse: The Cy-Bugs completely overrun Sugar Rush, forcing an evacuation of all of its residents (except for Vanellope, who is a glitch and physically cannot leave) and wrecking their world.
• Sugar Bowl: The Sugar Rush game is a bright and cheerful world of candy where cute little kids race mini-karts. It is more Crapsaccharine World under King Candy's rule but it is implied that is was a genuine example when Princess Vanellope reigned, and will be again.
• Supernormal Bindings: After Vanellope is captured by King Candy and thrown in his Fungeon she's shown in an enormous shackle labeled "100% glitch-proof".
• Super Strength: Ralph. Aside from the obvious strength it takes for him to keep wrecking the apartment building, he is able to split a jawbreaker which Vanellope says is unbreakable, lift and trash much of the racing stadium, smash Vanellope's kart, and more. This is important in the climax.
• Sympathy for the Devil: The story does a good job establishing this for Ralph at the start. (The backstory of the game is that Ralph's home tree was cut down to build the building that is the setting for Fix-It Felix Jr. The stump is at the dump Ralph lives in.)
• Tag Line: Sometimes, you just need a reset button for life.
• Take a Third Option: When faced with the Sadistic Choice of either letting Vanellope race and possibly have Sugar Rush shut down OR save her life by destroying her kart, he initially goes for the second option until he comes to realize there there may be a third option: trying to fix her glitching. This plan is successful.
• Take That!: The First-Person Shooter gets this big time when it gets brought up In-Universe:
  • While the initial idea of the modern era of gaming being represented by a First-Person Shooter already had shades of this, Ralph's line "When did video games become so violent and scary?" further drives the point home.^note To clarify, this isn't a Take That! aimed at that genre per se, but rather, one aimed at the way First Person Shooters are near-omnipresent in the gaming industry today. Nintendo systems aside, shooters are everywhere. In other words, if someone was asked to define Video Games with one genre, the go-to one would have been, say, the platform genre in The '90s, while today it's safe to say that grim 'n' gritty shooters are the first thing coming to mind when thinking of the medium. The parody-named FPS in the movie is named Hero's Duty, after the well-known sequel-spawning Cash Cow Franchise. Oddly, though Hero's Duty has many gritty elements of modern games, it is actually a Light Gun Game instead of a First-Person Shooter, especially given its arcade heritage. This is further enforced by a promotional version of Hero's Duty on Disney's web site, which plays like a conventional Light Gun Game.
  • In this promotional picture, to quote it without acronyms◊, a homeless Q*bert character is holding a cardboard sign reading "Will appear as a Non-Player Character in a First-Person Shooter for food". Ouch.
• Teleport Spam: Vanellope's glitching causes her to randomly relocate a few feet in a random direction. Once she learns how to control her glitching, she can teleport at will, which she uses to save Ralph from his attempted Heroic Sacrifice by glitching around and through an incoming onslaught of Cy-Bugs. It also makes her the game's best racer in the end, because she can teleport through the other racers.
• Temporary Platform: As Vanellope tells Ralph, "double stripe" branches on candy cane trees in Sugar Rush vanish when touched (though at inconsistent rates, because it's funnier that way).
• Tempting Fate:
  • A couple leading right up to the climactic Cy-Bug attack:
    • Ralph, watching the race, says, "Okay, kid. Let's finish this thing without any more surprises." Right as Calhoun makes it to the race track...
    • A few seconds later, after Calhoun accuses Ralph of ruining Sugar Rush by causing the Cy-Bugs to multiply, he says, "That thing died in the Taffy Swamp." Cue a giant swarm of Cy-Bugs bursting out of the stands.
  • When Felix enters Hero's Duty, Calhoun refuses to believe that Ralph made it into the game, stating that "nothing gets past me." We then hear sounds coming from the tower (which Ralph is climbing) directly afterward.
  • During the race in the climax, Taffyta taunts Vanellope, restating that she is "an accident waiting to happen." Moments later, Vanellope ends up glitching in front of Taffyta and her posse, causing them to botch a jump and get eliminated from the race.
• That Came Out Wrong: Hero's Duty has the unfortunate trait of sounding like "Hero's Doody," a pun on another word for human excrement. Vanellope takes advantage of this. It's even intentionally used in its commercial's tagline: "It's the biggest Duty of all." Or, you're supposed to read it as "It's the biggest doody of all!"
• There Was a Door: As per his nature, Ralph crashes through a lot of walls in this movie. His ability to do this actually factors into the plan Vanellope cooks up and it makes breaking her and Felix out of the fungeon a breeze.
• This Is for Emphasis, Bitch!: "End of the line, glitch!"
• This Is Not a Drill: "Quarter Alert. Quarter Alert. This is not a drill." ^note A Quarter Alert is what is declared in Hero's Duty when a player has put enough quarters into the game to earn a play credit.
• Throw-Away Guns: Calhoun does this; she probably has no means to replenish her ammo inside Sugar Rush anyway.
• Time Passes Montage: The opening shows time in the arcade passing as new games are moved in to replace the old, with Ralph's game forming the centerpiece as the popular one that never changes. What really helps sell it is that the Fix-It Felix Jr. machine is sitting right next to a Pac-Man machine, one of the few games you're almost guaranteed to find in any arcade. This also provides justification for why Pac-Man and Clyde appear in the movie and why Clyde seems to be the head of the support group (being among the oldest still around).
• Tiny Guy, Huge Girl: Calhoun is tall enough to be eye-level Felix and a hypothetical twin standing on his shoulders. He has to make a big jump to kiss her check.
• Toilet Humour: Vanellope's fond of this one, and thinks Hero's Duty sounds like "Hero's Doody."
• Token Romance: The relationship between Felix and Calhoun could have been removed without impacting the movie's main plot at all. The creators said they were paired up mostly because the crew thought they were a funny/cute couple, and because something about Felix's 3-D model didn't work right at first, but putting him alongside Calhoun gave the animators a better sense of proportion.
• Tough Love: Ralph destroys Vanellope's kart in order to stop her from racing and save her life, despite knowing how much it will hurt her and ruin their friendship. This is subverted when King Candy pretends he's trying to protect Vanellope, but later is revealed to be actually lying.
• Town with a Dark Secret: Sugar Rush has one dark secret that is so dark and secret that nobody even remembers it because King Candy/Turbo locked everyone's memories away.
  Ralph: What's going on in this candy-coated heart of darkness?
• Trailers Always Lie:
  • The marketing. It's a movie about video games, with tons of cameos, but all the featured games are invented and only Q-bert and Zangief are anything more than cameos. M. Bison has one brief line during the Bad-Anon meeting, Doctor Eggman has no lines at all, and Sonic speaks in a pre-recorded message — all three appear in marketing and even on the DVD cover. They get more publicity than Calhoun!
  • The Bad-Anon scenes featured also gave the impression that somehow, a lot of heroes would turn out to be jerks in their real lives, stamping these poor "villains" down into the dirt. Fix-It Felix Jr. is a great guy, and it is implied that most heroes are.
• Training Montage: Vanellope learning how to drive last for several scenes and one song "shut up and drive".
• Trap Door: The way Fix-It Felix Jr. is captured by King Candy is a handy hole under the doormat.
• Trauma Button: The love-struck Felix calls Calhoun "Dynamite Gal". Unluckily, that happens to be her late fiance's Affectionate Nickname for her, and she throws him out of the craft.
• Tropaholics Anonymous: Bad-Anon is a support group that helps video-game villains deal with their problems and help cope with their lot in life, though apparently the opening sequence is actually Ralph's first time attending it.
• Troperiffic: Just look at the size of this page; it took you a while to get this far down, didn't it? Since this is a movie about video games as a whole, it is appropriate.
• Troubled Backstory Flashback: This is triggered when Felix calls Calhoun "one dynamite gal", to all the scenes when her fiancé calls her the same, up until he's eaten by a Cy-Bug.
• Turbine Blender: Once inside Sugar Rush, Ralph's escape pod from Hero's Duty goes down to cotton-candy cloud FOD in the traditional smoking-turbine fashion.

Tropes U to Z

• Ultra Super Happy Cute Baby Fest Farmer 3000: Sugar Rush is intended to be one given all the colors, candy motif in the landscape and the equally sugar-sweet theme song.
• Unkempt Beauty:
  • Sgt. Calhoun has stunning "high definition" despite spending all her time in a bug war.
  • Vanellope is "a brat with dirty hair" who is also an "adorable winner".
• The Unmasqued World:
  • Averted; nobody ever realizes that the video-game characters are sentient and living in their own world. If something goes wrong (like Turbo invading a Road Blasters cabinet), they just think the game is glitching and call the arcade manager to look at it. And not even he really knows what's happening; all he does is slap "Out of Order" posters on the screens or replace the machines altogether.
  • When the Q*bert crew join the Fix-It Felix Jr. crew in their machine in the ending, the arcade-goers just assume that it's a fun retro remix of both games.
• Unusual Euphemism:
  • All of the main characters except Ralph have a few phrases that are a little bizarre. Some of these are of the Hold Your Hippogriffs sense, but others are just quirky.
    Sgt. Calhoun: [to Felix] Who the holy hotcakes are you?^note Though this line isn't actually said in the film.
    Vanellope: Sweet mother of monkey milk!
    Felix: Jimminy jamminy!
    Vanellope: C'mon, Ralph, move your molasses!
    Ralph: Sweet mother hubbard!
    Felix: Yikes on bikes!
    King Candy: Milk my duds!
    Felix: Oh my land!
  • An important one mentioned by a few characters is the phrase "Going Turbo". This concept is a reference to another game character who decided to jump to another game and ended up destroying both that game and his own.
• Up, Up and Away!: Almost. During his attempted Heroic Sacrifice to save Sugar Rush, Ralph plummets down with one fist extended towards the ground in the classic Superman flying pose, further emphasizing his heroic status.
• Vader Breath: Invoked so that the audience realizes Ralph is hiding in the chocolate pond to escape being detected by the Devil Dogs and is using a wafer snorkel to breathe. Funnily, the sound doesn't come in until after the guards leave the scene, and (obviously) stops when Ralph removes the straw. The sound is identical to that of Darth Vader's breathing as it was made the same way: breathing with a scuba tank.
• Vague Age:
  • While all game characters are technically immortal unless they die along with their game or outside of it, Ralph looks to be about in his 30s, albeit he's nine feet tall and 643 pounds, Felix and Calhoun seem to be in their late 20s, and Vanellope and all her racing rivals are supposedly about 9-10 years old.
  • The games they come from (and by extension, the characters themselves) have different ages: Ralph and Felix have both been around for 30 years each, Vanellope's game has been around since 1997, making her chronologically 15 years old and Calhoun's game was only just installed a week before the events of the movie, making her the youngest character chronologically.
• Vile Villain, Saccharine Show: Turbo/King Candy, who is more than willing to murder children to stay in the spotlight in the Sugar Bowl of Sugar Rush. He is more vile than the official villains.
• The Villain Makes the Plot: In-universe: Fix-It Felix Jr. is unplayable without Ralph there to smash up the building, leaving Felix nothing to fix to complete the level. Felix himself seems all too aware that a hero is only as good as his villain. Unfortunately nobody else in their game realizes that before the events of the movie.
• Villainous Breakdown: King Candy slips into one after getting bypassed by Vanellope in the daily race for who gets to appear in the character roster, and resorts to trying to kill Vanellope with a car-part and getting his true form revealed.
  King Candy/Turbo: I'm Turbo! The greatest racer ever! And I did not reprogram this world to let you, and that halitosis-ridden warthog, TAKE IT AWAY FROM ME!
• Villain Exclusivity Clause: Spoofed with Ralph, he gets tired of doing the same all the time.
• Villainous Face Hold: A Cy-bug corrupted Turbo/Candy King has captured Ralph]] and holds his jaw still so that he's forced to watch Sugar Rush be consumed by Cy-bugs. As he does this, he taunts Ralph about how Vanellope will be killed as she is unable to leave the game.
• Villain Protagonist: Ralph is this if you take his label as a "bad guy" at face value, though in terms of actual character outside the game he lives in he's not really evil at all and has no malicious intentions at any point in the story. In the Real Life version of Fix-It Felix Jr. however, Ralph is a straight Villain Antagonist.
• Villains Out Shopping: The film establishes that video game villains have social lives and such when not "engaged in their employment".
• Villains Want Mercy: When Vanellope threatens to execute the Sugar Rush Racers for being bullies, they immediately grovel and tearfully beg for mercy.
• Visual Pun:
  • When Vanellope is locked up, you'll see several pics of things on the wall of her cell in the Fungeon: a sad clown, a lion, etc. There's also a doghouse, with only eyes showing out of the darkness inside. Because anyone in the fungeon is "in the doghouse".
  • The Oreo guards chanting, "Oooor-REE-oooh. OOO-REEEEEEEEEEEEE-oh!"
  • The duty joke is especially seen on the commercial for Hero's Duty, with that large earthly green triangle as the game's symbol with the title on top.
    Narrator: Hero's Duty. It's the biggest doody of all.
  • When King Candy has his true identity as Turbo unmasked through Vanellope's glitching, he literally "goes Turbo". This also counts for the Cy-Bug he merges with later on.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: Ralph and Vanellope.
• Vocal Dissonance: Save King Candy, none of the Sugar Rush racers have voices that fit their child-like appearances, instead sounding more like teenagers or even adults.
• Von Neumann Machine: the Cy-Bugs are robotic beetles that consume resources (up to and including people), and use them to make more Cy-Bugs, while adapting both themselves and their offspring to the environment (metals in their home game Hero's Duty; candies in Sugar Rush). They can also eat weaponry to assimilate it into themselves. They seem to be an accident, and the Hero's Duty prequel comic confirms that they were the result of a failed science experiment.
• The Von Trope Family: Vanellope Von Schweetz. The "von" is foreshadowing her princess status.
• Wacky Racing: Sugar Rush is a Sugar Bowl version of Mario Kart, right down to the ridiculous track hazards (giant rolling gumballs? check) and use of item boxes (of course it's funnier given that Mario Kart 8 was later released with a Sugar Rush-type track called Sweet Sweet Canyon).
• Wallbonking: As Markowski mutters his Madness Mantra, he can't seem to find the door...
• Wall Jump: Felix does one of these to avoid Calhoun's projectiles on his first trip into Hero's Duty.
• Was It Really Worth It?: When Ralph wins his bet with the Nicelanders, but realizes that his game is about to be unplugged due to his actions.
• Wham Shot:
  • The shot from Ralph's point of view that shows Vanellope on the side of the game console that leads to the above line.
  • The shot of Vanellope's sparking box of code, meaning a) she is not a glitch like everyone is saying and b) someone (a.k.a. King Candy) intentionally removed her from the game system.
  • Vanellope making King Candy glitch, exposing him as Turbo. Even Ralph and Felix's jaws drop when this happens.
• What a Piece of Junk: Vanellope's new car ends up getting some very sloppy decorations thanks to Ralph accidentally breaking the kart-baking minigame, but she makes it from last place to first place when everyone else had a least a good minute head-start, meaning stats-wise it's probably superior to even King Candy's ride (given how fast she clearly is going when she overtakes him). And when Vanellope learns how to master her glitching, she can Teleport Spam it at will.
• What Does This Button Do?: Vanellope is asking this question with regard to the speed pedal of her freshly baked kart. Hilarity Ensues.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Ralph is given one by Gene, after the former returns to the Niceland Apartments with a medal in hand, but discovers that it's out of order. To add the twist to the knife, Gene sounds genuinely disappointed rather than being furious or being smug.
• Who's Laughing Now?: Played for Laughs with Princess Vanellope.
  Princess Vanellope: Tut tut, as your merciful princess, I hereby decree that everyone who was ever mean to me shall be...executed.
• When All You Have Is a Hammer...:
  • All Felix has is a hammer, however it fixes things. Noticeable when he tries to break out of the fungeon with it, with predictable results.
  • Ralph's one talent is smashing things (and he does it well), and he uses it to get by as he ventures through the arcade. For instance, when constructing a track for Vanellope to practice on.
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: Ralph describes what happened after the climax in the end.
• Widowed at the Wedding: As described by one of the Hero's Duty NPCs, Sergeant Calhoun has the most tragic backstory ever: one in which her fiancé was killed by a Cy-Bug when she failed to do a perimeter check on their wedding day.
• Wistful Amnesia: Vanellope knows she's meant to be a racer.
• Witch with a Capital B: Vanellope being called a "glitch" just screams this trope.
• Wolverine Publicity:
  • Zigzagged Trope. While there is a movie poster that features only the four main characters, others have one of the four surrounded by some of the movie's many cameos. While the film's makers certainly crafted the story first, cameos are highly advertised — the Sega and Nintendo characters are right on the cover when they have very little to do or say. Most watchers expected them to feature far more heavily in the movie than they really did. Even more baffling, the movie's character sometimes isn't even the most prominent character in the poster!^note You can view them all here
  • In-universe, this trope sets off the climax. Vanellope is prominently painted on the Sugar Rush arcade cabinet, the one piece of evidence King Candy had no control over covering in his quest for attention, and it's what clues Ralph in to how to make everything better. To gamers, they must be wondering why this raven-haired girl is nowhere in the actual game.
• World-Healing Wave: Vanellope's victory causes the system to reset and unleash a wave of light with her as its epicenter. This undoes all the damage caused by the Cy-Bugs and King Candy/Turbo, as well as restoring her proper place in the game and the other characters' memories of her.
• Worth It:
  • In the ending: Ralph's every in-game defeat becomes a chance to see Vanellope succeeding at her game.
  • The cast of the Fix-It Felix Jr. game invite older video game characters to join in "Bonus Stages" in their world, even though death for them there would be permanent. However, given that only Felix has the most significant risk of dying in this world, the risk to their lives is at best negligible and it's a lot better than being homeless. Also, Felix is shown to be able to heal people as well as fix stuff, thus helping grant the outcasts and decommissioned characters a better life. Fans also theorize that Felix tampered with the code to integrate the outcasts properly — making them legitimate characters and safe from permadeath.
• Wouldn't Hurt a Child: Despite being furious with Vanellope's stealing his medal and her constant wisecracks, Ralph can't bring himself to hurt her and starts trashing the landscape instead to vent.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: Ralph, being from an '80s platformer, has no clue what kind of violence he could find in a bug-infested, 21^st Century, Science Fiction, First-Person Shooter. He thought it would be like Centipede.
• X-Ray Sparks: In the closing credits, Ralph tries going a round against Blanka and gets shocked, with the usual lighting up of the skeleton associated with this attack.
• Xtreme Kool Letterz: Two deleted scenes from the movie show a game called Xtreme EZ Livin' 2.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are: When Ralph is thrown into the Fungeon with Fix-It Felix, he tells Felix that he tried running away and being a good guy by going to Hero's Duty and taking the medal; Ralph asks Felix to fix Vanellope's cart, which he agrees to do. Later on, when the Cy-Bug has turned into an invasive swarm, Ralph punches the Mentos mints into the diet cola fountain, telling himself "I'm bad, and that's good! I will never be good, and that's not bad! There's no one I'd rather be... than me." Ralph ends up becoming a hero to Vanellope, the other Sugar Rush racers and inhabitants by saving their game, with the Nicelanders treating him with more respect and consideration, and he even helps out unemployed video game characters to make special cameo guest appearances in Niceland.
  Ralph: If that little kid likes me, how bad can I be?
• You Are Who You Eat: Cy-Bugs become whatever they eat. During Hero's Duty gameplay, we see it demonstrated when a Cy-Bug eats a gun and sprouts Arm Cannons. A Cy-Bug who starts eating the landscape of Sugar Rush becomes candy-coated. In the finale, a glitch-infected King Candy/Turbo is eaten by a Cy-Bug. Ralph then has a show-down with a terrifying glitch-infected King Candy/Turbo/Cy-Bug monster.
• "You!" Exclamation: Twice from Ralph:
  • When King Candy drives up to meet him.
  • And earlier when he finally finds Vanellope on the race track.
• You Need a Breath Mint: While not word for word, Vanellope, King Candy, and Sour Bill have commented on Ralph's halitosis.
• You No Take Candle: The House of the Dead zombie speaks in this manner.
• Your Makeup Is Running: Taffyta at the end when Vanellope sentences her to death and she starts sobbing.
• You Wouldn't Hit a Guy with Glasses?: Ralph plucks the glasses and hits King Candy on the head with the frames, shattering the lenses.
  King Candy: You hit a guy... with glasses... that, heh, that's well played.

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I'm bad, and that's good. I will never be good, and that's not bad. There is no one I would rather be... than me.

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