The Grim Adventures Of Billy And Mandy / Tropes E to H

The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy Trope Examples
A - D | E - H | I - M | N - R | S - Z

---

E

• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • The first season (aka the Grim & Evil segments) were way different than what the should would turn into:
    • It had a completely different title card theme. The second season would establish the title card theme the rest of the series used.
    • The first season had a lot more dark humor than the slapstick and random humor the later seasons would pick up on.
    • The art style, colors and character designs were a lot more off-model, with a handful of season one episodes looking noticeably different from each other
    • Pud'n had a much bigger role.
    • Irwin had a more stereotypical squeaky nerd voice and rarely ever said his infamous catchphrase, "Yo". The early episodes also make it seem that Irwin genuinely hates Billy and wants nothing to do with him or Mandy. A stark contrast to how he is later on as her Stalker with a Crush.
    • Harold was much smarter and had a bit of a short fuse.
    • Gladys hated Grim a lot more in the earlier episodes, frequently trying to get rid of him, where later on she simply tolerates him.
  • A Running Gag in later seasons is that Mandy never smiles... except she has in early episodes as seen under Perpetual Frowner. Also, the Grim & Evil-era episodes were much darker in tone.
  • In "Trepanation of the Skull and You", the original short film starring Billy and Mandy that Maxwell Atoms made in college, the two characters are very different from how they ended up being in the series. Billy doesn't seem to be as dim-witted, Mandy has a radically different design and is far more chipper than her final characterization as an intimidating jerk, and both of them are taller and lankier.
  Grim: Those people didn't even look like us!
• Easter Egg: There was once an actual site online mirroring the Secret Snake Club's 1-page shrine to their god Shnissugah (which consisted of an animation of the deity in question slithering back and forth, "dancing" if clicked on, a message saying they would "pwn the cool kids," and some fake ads).
• Eating the Enemy: You can play a Drinking Game out of how often characters eat each other in this show. And in many cases, they come back later like nothing ever happened. Some notable instances:
  • In the early episode, It's Hokeymon, Billy has Grim bring their Mon cards to life and they predictably cause utter chaos. To put an end to it, Mandy has Grim make a Hokeymon out of a card she made which fires Transformation Rays that turn whatever they hit into toast. Once the all the monsters are turned into toast, they're then disposed of by pigeons.
  • In the special episode, Wrath of the Spider Queen, Velma Queen, who was an old friend of Grim's from school, unleashed her spider army onto Endsville with the goal of world domination. And to top it off, she intended to devour Grim's head to take his title of reaper from him after he apparently cheated to get the title. However, at the climax of the movie, after Grim reveals that it was a big misunderstanding, she drops her plan to eat him.
  • In Underfist, Billy gives Hoss Delgado a weapon called the Candy Blaster that he states is able to One-Hit Kill any single piece of candy. Near the end of the movie, Irwin and Hoss find themselves locked in a combat with a massive monster comprised of all the mutated chocolate monsters from before. Seeing no better moment, Hoss decides to use the Candy Blaster on the monster...which turns out to be Billy...who then proceeds to devour the entire beast and winds up with a big Balloon Belly to boot.
• Eldritch Abomination: Nergal Jr's true form is apparently horrific. Cthulhu's also showed up, and Yog Sothoth almost did. Also, Mandy. (At least to her antagonists, and quite literally when she assumes an immortal slug form in the future, allowing her to conquer Earth.)
  • The ending of "Scary Poppins" where she is able to MIND CONTROL EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER FROM THE SHOW to scare the nanny away more or less confirms it — Mandy is a Thing That Should Not Be.
• Elemental Plane: One of several D&D references involved Grim trying to take Billy and Mandy to the elemental plane of fire.
• Elves Versus Dwarves: "Here Thar Be Dwarves" was a whole episode devoted to the subject, with the enmity between them happening because the dwarves were jealous of the elves running the business of cookie production while they were stuck harvesting mushrooms.
• End-of-Series Awareness: Two of them in the final, sixth season.
  • In "Everything Breaks", Lord Pain tells Billy that it's about time he visited, to which Billy replied "I'll say. The show's almost over!"
  • In the "Wrath of the Spider Queen" special, Billy brings the Grim Reaper to class, to which Ms. Butterbean tells him "The Grim Reaper was pretty cool the first five or six times you brought it to class, but the magic's sorta worn off."
• Enfant Terrible: Mandy is a young girl and tends to be cruel and mean-sprited on her best days, and a outright world-conquering villain at her worst.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • Mandy may support any and every legitimate attempt at revenge, dreams of ruling the world as a dystopian dictator, and doesn't flinch at any of the hellish Eldritch Abominations we see throughout the show. But she does NOT condone cheating.
  • In "Company Halt", Skarr says he's willing to do anything to get revenge on Billy. When Boskov growls a suggestion, Skarr responds with this
  Skarr: Well, anything except that. I can't believe you even suggested that, sicko.
• Evil Is Not a Toy + Be Careful What You Wish For: Thromnambular, a wishing skull who always grants wishes at a terrible price (voiced by Dwight Schultz, no less).
• Evil Versus Evil: Most conflicts in the show are between bad and worse characters, seeing as most monsters have to deal with Mandy's cruelty, if not Grim and Billy's as well. The most frequent example is the enmity between Mandy and Mindy and even in the game there is a mode named liked this, which features four of the characters fighting each other (Mandy and Junior with Eris and Boogey).
• Expy: The eponymous characters are simply human (and gender-bended, in Mandy's case) forms of Ren and Stimpy. They even copied the nose.
  • Eris' assistant Thud from "The Firebird Sweet" is very much an expy of Patrick Star; he's colored pink, not very bright, and voiced by Bill Fagerbakke to boot.
  • Grim's lawyer, the naga Harvey, is modeled directly after Christopher Walken.
• Extreme Omnivore: Billy will eat anything, even if it isn't edible. He once apparently confused steak sauce with dog feces.
• Eye on a Stalk: The creepy Brain-Eating Meteor has one long eystalk, which functions as a throat when his eye briefly splits open as a mouth.
• Eye Scream:
  • Subverted in "Recipe for Disaster" when a woman pepper sprays Grim, only for him to point out that it doesn't affect him because he has no eyes.
  • In "My Peeps", Billy ruins his eyesight by staring at the sun for far longer than anyone in real life can before going blind. His eyes actually turn into frying eggs, then dissipate, leaving behind holes in his head. When Grim fixes Billy's sight, he ends up getting visions of people getting injured that are destined to come true. When Grim tries to fix it again at the end of the episode, Billy's eyes are replaced with live-action eyes.
  • In the episode "Complete and Utter Chaos", Billy is poked in the eye by the Apple of Discord (which had sprouted mechanical spider legs) in his sleep.
  • "Substitute Creature" has a scene where Mandy hands Irwin a telescope, then punches him while he's looking through it and forces it into his eye socket, causing him to scream and say that he can't see.
  • In "Fear and Loathing in Endsville", when Grim and Dracula decide to cook and eat the scorpions that were chasing them earlier, their giant mother appears. Dracula says that he wouldn't have eaten her babies if they weren't so delicious, followed by her stabbing him in the eye with her stinger.
  • In "Prank Call of Cthulhu", Grim gives Billy an ominous speech to deter him from using the Phone of Cthulhu, but when he's done Billy informs him that his Fireball Eyeballs are still lit. Grim asks for something to put it out, but Billy makes it worse by giving him a pitcher of coffee, a bottle of hot sauce, a barrel of acid, and a container of rocket fuel.

F

• Facial Horror: Billy's face getting ripped or blown off is a Running Gag.
• Fade Around the Eyes: In one scene of "Billy and Mandy's Jacked-up Halloween", Jack o' Lantern leers at the screen ominously as it fades to black around him. An interesting example in that, because he has a jack o' lantern for a head, both his eyes and his mouth light up^note He has no nose. The weird part is, his eyes always glow, but his mouth doesn't except in this scene.
• Family-Unfriendly Death: All too common in the early episodes, characters would suffer grisly deaths that most children's shows do not have the stomach to depict.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • Hoss Delgado's prejudice against monsters comes off as this, since he often attacks every supernatural being he encounters regardless of whether or not they're doing anything wrong.
  • In "Billy & Mandy Save Christmas" Mandy has a prejudice against vampires for some reason.
• Fear Song: Played with. Billy sings "Scary-O" to list all of the things he is supposedly not scared of, but the song's lyrics consist of a series of paradoxes that invalidate his claims and make it clear he is actually terrified of everything he is saying.
  Billy: "I'm not scared of earthquakes, as long as the ground doesn't shake!"
• Fitness Nut: Mighty Moe is a health guru who does absolutely everything he can to stay healthy. He's so successful at this that every year Grim is forced to bestow upon him bonus years, effectively extending his life indefinitely. Needless to say this annoys the Reaper to no end, especially since Moe is quite smug about the accomplishment. So much so that he's decided to write a book on the subject, potentially putting Grim out of business.
  • Killdozer the dragon Billy tries to fight is revealed to be this as well although it's portrayed more as him being an antisocial nerd, working out at home and eating gross foods for the health benefits, with lifting weights rather than being a jock or bully as workout obsession is usually depicted.
• Flanderization: Mandy, believe it or not. Earlier in the show, she was very witty and snarky, but by no means intimidating enough to order her own parents (or anyone else other than Grim, Billy, and Irwin) around. She also had a rare smirk or two in the early episodes before becoming a complete Perpetual Frowner whose smile could bring about The End of the World as We Know It. She was probably more of an Anti-Hero in some of those earlier episodes rather than the more consistent Nominal Hero later on.
  • Billy's stupidity, hyperactivity and other negative traits are significantly cranked up as the series progresses.
• Flat-Earth Atheist: Mandy doesn't believe in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy even though they are shown to exist in this show's universe.
• Fluffy the Terrible: Mandy's innocuous-sounding name belies how cruel she really is.
• Foe Romance Subtext: In "Here Thar Be Dwarves!", dwarf king Beardbottom and Daddy Elf seem to have something going on despite their mutual disdain. Daddy Elf makes a show of complimenting Beardbottom's impressive physique when he's tricking the latter out of the lucrative cookie franchise, while Beardbottom notes that the elves have an "intoxicating aroma of summer lilac".
• Forgotten Fallen Friend: In Nergal Jr.'s origin episode, he paralyzes a boy who was disgusted by his appearance and shapeshifts into his form, doing the same to all other children he meets who refuse to be his friend (as an homage to John Carpenter's The Thing (1982)). In future episodes, this boy's form is Nergal Jr.'s "default". The other children were rescued by Billy and Mandy, but Nergal Jr.'s initial victim is never mentioned or seen again... and this episode takes place in bitterly cold weather.
• Foreshadowing: In Wrath of the Spider Queen during a flashback when Boogey cheats during the Reaper election, he states the only way someone could win the election fairly after the ballot is stuffed is if everyone remaining voted for that person. It turns out this is actually how Grim won. He stopped Boogey from cheating then replaced all the voting ballots with ones that had Velma's name on them instead. When Velma thought he rigged it for himself, he chased Boogey down and did a terrifying performance in front of the whole school, so everyone who hadn't voted yet voted for him instead of Velma or Boogey.
  • At the beginning of the flashback in the same episode, after Grim comments on how scary Velma is when she wants to be, she chalks it up to “pent-up rage”. She then motivates Grim by telling him that he has it as well, and that he just needs to figure out how to harness it. Turns out all he needed was a scythe.
• Four-Temperament Ensemble: Billy (Sanguine), Mandy (Choleric), Grim (Melancholic) and Irwin (Phlegmatic).
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: Several of the brief segments at the beginning of every episode of Mandy talking to the viewer have her make sinister threats toward them.
  • After Nergal ends up transforming everyone in Endsville into beings like him in "Something Stupid This Way Comes", he then transforms the viewer while saying that they'll be his closest, most bestest friend of all.
  • At the end of "A Grim Prophecy", the cave witch tells the audience that she's foreseen their future as well and cackles evilly after revealing that said future is an eternity of commercials.
  • The episode "Duck", features a ghostly, well, duck blowing raspberries by unfortunate bystanders, making it seem like their farting. At the end of the episode, Grim and Mandy are lounging at home when they hear the duck going at it again. At that point, both were already visited by the duck, so it couldn't have been by either of them. Cue Irwin's Grandmama facing the viewer saying, "Oh baby, that is just nasty!"
  • The end of "Everything Breaks" has Billy and Lord Pain deciding to wreck everything in sight. As Billy runs after his friends and family with his mace, Lord Pain uses his to literally break the fourth wall.
  • The short "Fit to be Tied" has Billy demanding a bunny to tie his shoes. Instead, the bunny decides to attack Billy. As Billy runs from even more bunnies coming to maul him, one of the bunnies stops in front of the viewer to blast them with its laser vision.
• Fratbro: In "Attack of the Clowns", while Mandy and Grim are trying to help Billy conquer his fear of clowns, Billy goes to his happy place in his mind where he encounter his imaginary "Inner Frat Boy" who helps Billy conquer his fear...by turning it into hatred for anyone different than him.
• The Freelance Shame Squad: Grim meets up with his old schoolmate, The Boogeyman, and is not happy about it. When asked why, we flashback to their school days, where Boogey gave Grim a giant wedgie in front of the whole school. Right before they all laugh at him, one monster says "Let's all point and laugh at his humiliation!"
• Friendly Neighborhood Spider: Jeff, a Giant Spider who is friendly and kind and thinks Billy is his father. Billy, on the other hand, is dreadfully afraid of spiders, and always tries to swat him whenever he appears.
• The "Fun" in "Funeral": One of the flashbacks in Grim's narration of Jack O'Lantern's past in "Billy and Mandy's Jacked-Up Halloween" shows Jack O'Lantern putting a whoopie cushion into an open grave just before the coffin is lowered in, resulting in the mourners barely restraining themselves from laughing after the subsequent flatulent noise.
• Fun with Acronyms: In the self-defense seminar Hoss Delgado gives to the senior citizen monsters in "Senior Power", Hoss' advised technique is spelled out as Power, Offense, Obstruction, and Protection.
• Future Badass: In the Dune parody "Mandy the Merciless" in which Future Mandy rules the world, Irwin (or a descendant) is the huge, muscular leader of La Résistance.

G

• Garrulous Growth: In "Billy's Growth Spurt", Billy gets a sentient growth he calls "Yop-Yop" (from the sound it makes) as a side effect of one of Grim's family cures for indigestion. Yop-Yop starts growing as Billy feeds it junk food, and it eventually turns into a homonculous-like miniature Billy and jumps off Billy's back. Mandy gets rid of it by tricking it into drinking another of Grim's home remedies, causing it to dissolve into pink goo.
• Gasshole: Billy has a tendency to fart and burp. As does his dad, Harold.
• Gassy Gastronomy: In "Sickly Sweet", Grim lights a magical fire on Mandy's carpet and tries to put it out before she notices. He resorts to sitting on the spot and, when questioned about the smoke coming from under his robe, he tries to blame it on eating beans (even though, being a skeleton, he has no internal organs).
• Getting High on Their Own Supply: Billy sells magical chocolates door to door, but he starts eating his own product and is soon hooked. Being magical chocolates, they eventually turn him into chocolate, at which point he starts eating himself. The dealer, a sailor made of chocolate, admits that this happens every time.
• Giant Spider: Jeff, is a partial subversion - he's a giant spider, but he's extremely friendly, kind, and only wants his father (Billy) to love him. Billy's arachnophobia makes things very difficult...
• Girl with Psycho Weapon: When Billy's mom tells you that dinner is ready, you better get your butt to the table. *revs up the chainsaw*
  • In another episode, Mandy replaces Mindy as the head cheerleader of the school football team (although Mandy's "cheers" are just telling the team what to do). Mindy becomes enraged and, with the help of the goddess of cheerleading who takes the form of a trophy in Mindy's room, uses increasingly insane weaponry to get Mandy off the squad.
• Gleeful and Grumpy Pairing: Billy is the optimistic and cheerful one who's often naïve, while Mandy is the devious, mean and grumpy one known for wearing an ironically cutesy wardrobe.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: In "Opposite Day," Grim spends the entire episode being sucked by Billy and Mandy into doing chores by not understanding the basic concept of the holiday. When he finally uses it against them, they point out that because they said it was Opposite Day, that means it's not, so he did all the work for nothing. Cue Grim babbling his lips and bashing his head with a mallet.
• Goofy Print Underwear: In "Substitute Creature", when Nergal Jr. as Ms. Butterbean is giving Sperg a wedgie offscreen Billy comments "Sperg's got the same bunny underwear I do!"
• Gonky Femme: In the episode "Duck!", Grim dreams that he is married to a skull-faced dragon with a lion's mane, high heels, a pearl necklace and an apron. The monster is described as a "beautiful wife" by Grim.
• Greeting Gesture Confusion: In the episode "Dream Mutt", when Billy meets his dream dog, Wiggy Jiggy Jed, he offers Billy a handshake but Billy gives him a high-five instead.
• The Grim Reaper: The personification of death happens to be one of the show's main characters. He is called Grim.
• Gross-Up Close-Up: We quite often see disgustingly detailed close-ups for comedic or horrific effect.
• Grossout Show: Played for Laughs.
• Guest-Star Party Member: The main trio is frequently joined on their misadventures by at least one other character. While this role typically falls to Irwin, other characters, recurring or otherwise have also stepped up to fill in as their "fourth musketeer" of sorts.

H

• Hair-Raising Hare: In "Wishbones", Pud'n wishes for a pet rabbit. The rabbit repeatedly attempts to kill him, no matter how badly injured it becomes.
• Hammerspace: Where Hoss Delgado keeps his various hand attachments (they're normally seen shifting into place from somewhere inside his arm).
• Hanging Up on the Grim Reaper: The premise is that Grim came for the soul of a pet hamster, and was accidentally stopped by precocious kids Billy and Mandy. Billy is so dumb and Mandy is so dark that they can't be intimidated by the Reaper, and they win Grim's service after beating him at limbo over the hamster.
• Haplessly Hiding: Happens to Skarr over and over again in the episode "Herbicidal Maniac". Billy's stupidity gets Skarr turned into a plant-human and ruins his garden. Skarr gains powers and restores his garden, but still wants revenge on Billy for everything he's done. He attempts to sneak up on him as a bush three times but each time, Billy pees in it after noting it's been following him, Vegetarians eat all the leaves off him, and Jeff the Spider lays his eggs all over him then wraps him up in his webbing. He also disguised himself as a tree, only for a woodpecker to peck through his whole bad eye.
• Harmless Liquefaction: In "Ecto Cooler", Billy recites a poem claiming that looking at Sperg's mother would cause your face to melt. Surely enough, Principal Goodvibes looks at her and his face promptly melts.
  Goodvibes: Could someone get me a tissue?
• Head in a Vise: In "Spidermandy".
  Harold: Hey, Billy-boy. How was school?
  Billy: Not good. I feel like I spent the whole day with a clamp on my head. I need a nap.
  Gladice: Should we tell him that he does have a clamp on his head?
  Harold: Now where's the FUN IN THAT?!
• Helicopter Blender: "Herbicidal Maniac" has General Skarr escape his lawnmower exploding underneath him relatively unscathed, only to fly into the air and through a helicopter's blades:
  "Phew. It's funny, I had this foreboding feeling I was going to be accidentally mulched. Hm. AHHHH!!!"
• Hell Has New Management: There's an episode where the three main characters have nightmares. Billy and even Grim are both terrorized by their dreams, but in Mandy's dream she actually takes over Hell and becomes the Lord of Darkness.
• Helpless Kicking: When Ms. Butterbean gets eaten by a frog Billy brought to class, her butt and legs are seen dangling out of its mouth and flailing in the air.
• Heroic BSoD: Happens a few times. Mandy nearly has one when, in the Big Boogie Adventure, Billy is dragged underwater by the Kraken and doesn't seem to surface. She instantly comes to her senses when Billy finally resurfaces.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Grim is only trapped into being Billy and Mandy's best friend forever because he arrogantly added the stipulation to the limbo contest for Mr. Snuggles' soul. Had he just kept his mouth shut, he would have lost Mr. Snuggles and nothing else.
• Hollywood Mirage: Implied in "Fear and Loathing in Endsville", where Dracula at one point claims to find a limo. We don't see anything from his point of view, but the limo he finds turns out to be a cactus.
  Dracula: The limo hurts Dracula's butt!
• Honesty Aesop: In "Hog Wild", Billy, rather than facing a punishment for wrecking his dad's motorcycle, uses Grim's scythe to fix it, ends up turns his parents and many others into biker monsters. The only way everything can co back to normal is if Billy confesses his lie.
• Horrifying the Horror:
  • Even Grim is often disturbed by some of the things Billy & Mandy do, especially Mandy. It's all but stated that he holds to his bet to be their friend all because he's afraid of what Mandy would do to him otherwise.
  • Eris, goddess of chaos, once tried to enlist Billy to help spread discord - by the end of it Billy had proven to be so impenetrably stupid & chaotic that he drove her insane.
• Humanoid Abomination:
  • Nergal Jr takes on a human appearance but is still the son of a dark supernatural being.
  • In "Scary Poppins", Mandy is seen to be one as well, controlling everybody in Endsville.
• Humiliation Conga: Boogie gets this to absolutely insane levels after Grim takes Horror's hand from him. A rock falls off the ceiling and lands on him, the ground he's standing on breaks and said rock falls on him again, the ground breaks again and the rock follows, he gets thrown into the ceiling by the giant squid from earlier in the episode, again, along with the rock, he lands (but not before getting attacked by a swarm of bats on the way down) and gets crushed by the rock, which breaks, only for a bus to come out of nowhere and send him flying into his ship, which tilts and sends him hurtling into a cannon, which fires him through his ship and into a wall, sinking it.
  • A much less obvious example would be the whole movie for Mandy herself. Not only did she get dragged into the same misadventures as the rest of the group, but she was tortured with horrible nightmares for hours, got kissed by Irwin against her will, had to face her worst fears and ran away screaming, then got beaten up by bears and as if all this was not bad enough it turns out that she did not even win this time and didn't get to own Horror's Hand.
• Hypercompetent Sidekick: Grim is stuck playing second banana to Billy and Mandy and is frequently the most rational of the group.
• Hypocritical Humor: During the Underfist special.
  General Skarr: Wait a minute, I'm not a monster.
  Hoss Delgado: No, but I don't trust one-eyed weirdoes either.

---