Web Video / Detective Heart of America

Detective Heart of America is on TV Tropes!

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Detective Heart of America is a series of live-action shorts and one feature-length film created by FilmCow that parody Eagleland tropes and beliefs. The videos are filmed with prop statues that are given voice acting and character in post. The videos focus on an eagle prop named Heart of America, America’s greatest detective, tracking down and confronting criminals that pose a threat to American citizens.

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Tropes:

• American Eagle: The series parodies the Eagle Land trope, and the main character is a small plastic eagle statuette.
• Animalistic Abomination: Reggie's mom is a fifth-dimensional being named Gorslax. She looks like a rabbit wearing a dress and bonnet.
• Applied Phlebotinum: Americium, essentially Valhalla for Americans, is powered by cubes which are in turn powered by America. Amongst other things, they allow Jesus to bring Heart of America back to life multiple times, and watch people while they jerk off. Oh, and spheres are bad for some reason.
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: Fannie and Earl in one of the film’s only serious moments.
• Bandaged Face: Pinnochio in The Final Freedom, having been shot in the face in the first video.
• Brick Joke:
  • Heart of America constantly mocks (or at least has a rivalry with) the Ouya in the Kickstarter campaign videos. Ouya ends up being a major player and initial antagonist in the film.
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  • Heart of America wonders if Garfield still exists in Fug, and hopes that it doesn’t. It does, and forms the foundation of the Forbidden Knots.
  • Chess Mate swears that he will kill Heart of America by dropping a suitcase on him from the sky. He ends up saving Heart of America from an alien when he does it later in the movie.
• Boom, Headshot!: Heart of America shoots Pinnochio in the face in 1, an incident Pinnochio survives with minimal injuries.
• Bullet Catch: At the end of 2, the baby actually catches the bullets Heart of America shoots at him in his own gun.
• Catchphrase: “I’m just a stupid fuckin’ baby!”
• Cluster F-Bomb: Characters swear almost excessively at all times during this series for the sake of comedy.
• Combat Pragmatist: At the end of 1, Pinocchio leaps towards Heart of America, preparing to strike. In response, Heart of America pulls out a gun and shoots him in the face.
• Comic Relief: Invoked with Fug the Cat, who tries to be upbeat and comical, but only succeeds in annoying everyone present at the resistance.
• Continuity Cameo: Fannie and Earl, from the FilmCow series of the same name appear as characters in The Final Freedom.
• Crapsack World: The world that Ouya comes from. It originates from an alternate future where a race of higher beings, the "aliens" (though not really; information on their exact nature is vague), have eradicated free will and subjected all life on Earth to a tyrannical regime that has essentially rendered free will obsolete. They maintain this control using reality warping devices, of which Ouya is. At some point, a resistance movement was formed that Ouya joined after it began to question its creators, only to be crushed almost immediately. Ouya remained the sole survivor of this movement, and used its abilities to travel through time and space, repeatedly dismantling and reestablishing civilizations over countless ages in an effort to prevent the future it came from from ever existing. It comes close to completing its goal when it obtains a much more powerful reality warping device from the "aliens", but thanks to Heart of America, it fails.
• Death Is Cheap: Heart of America dies several times throughout The Final Freedom. Half of his deaths are due to Jesus bringing him back to life in midair, after which he falls to his death again.
• Dying Declaration of Love: Done simultaneously by all the Fugmerican natives, and Fannie and Earl to each other.
• Eagleland: Heavily parodied by the show’s very essence, even featuring a literal freedom-loving eagle as the main character. It’s also deconstructed in The Final Freedom when Pinnochio and Madison Square Garden try to recreate America by finding the Fugmerican natives and slaughtering them.
• Faux Symbolism: invoked The Fugmerican natives drop some of this:
  Debrah: A dark wind sets upon a cold land…
  Heart of America: …What?
  Debrah: Nothing. That means absolutely nothing.
• Implausible Deniability: The baby insists he's just "a stupid, fuckin' baby", but it's very clear he's a criminal mastermind.
• Kill 'Em All: Most named characters in The Final Freedom end up dead by the movie’s climax, including Ouya, Pinnochio, Madison Square Garden, the natives, Brendan, the baby, Fug the Cat, and Fannie and Earl. It’s confirmed in the Where Are They Now pre-credits scene that the only surviving characters are Heart of America, Sabina, Reggie, Goreslax and Jesus.
• La Résistance: Late in The Final Freedom, Heart of America learns of a resistance party residing in his hotel room consisting of all his friends and acquaintances.
• Love Dodecahedron: As the Fugmerican natives are being massacred by spectres, they all admit their love for each other.
• Mighty Whitey: Parodied, of course. The Native Fugmericans push Heart of America into this role in The Final Freedom while constantly lampshading that they are doing so. It makes him very uncomfortable.
• Monster of the Week: Pinnochio for 1, The Baby for 2.
• The Movie: After two shorts, DHOA was adapted into a feature film entitled The Final Freedom. The film was Kickstarted in 2013 and after several delays, was released in August 2015.
• Not Quite Dead: Pinnochio and the baby both survive to appear in The Final Freedom.
• Only the Leads Get a Happy Ending: At the end of the movie, Detective Heart of America uses the reality warping device Ouya wanted to use to erase the tyrannic control of the "aliens" and create actual free will to instead recreate America and turn the entire Earth into his own vision of America. As shown in the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue, he is awarded a free two night stay at the JW Marriott for his "heroic" deeds, Sabina starts her own company and Reggie turns in his badge to begin working for her. Every other character in the movie dies.
  • Not to mention the fact that Detective Heart of America's meddling with Ouya's plan essentially does nothing to change the fact that free will does not exist and the universe is still being controlled by tyrannical overlords.
• Remember the New Guy?: Both Played Straight and Subverted/Lampshaded in The Final Freedom: Heart of America’s partner, Reggie the Rabbit, appears as if he wasn’t a new character, but when Chess Mate appears and speaks about ending his long-running feud with Heart of America, Heart of America has no idea what he’s talking about, and doesn’t remember ever meeting him before.
• Reset Button: In The Final Freedom, Ouya uses Bitcoins to buy all of the US debt from China, and retroactively revokes the Constitution, meaning that America is not and never was a country. As a result, the country is reformed into a new land named “Fug”. Brendan implies that this has happened multiple times, stemming from a land named “Slamzone”.
• Ridiculously Long Phone Number: Inverted in The Final Freedom - the phone number of the resistance is 8, and so is their address.
• Running Gag: Reggie's mom Gorslax keeps getting caught in a vortex.
• Santa Claus: In The Final Freedom, one of the Fugmerican natives is shown to have killed Santa Claus and stolen his outfit.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: In The Final Freedom, the Native Fugmericans are definitely not an acting troupe that got lost in the woods. No sir.
• Stylistic Suck: The hands controlling the statues are constantly in shot, intentionally.
• Take That!: Several towards 'Lost'', in the second episode Detective Heart of America laments the hours he wasted on Lost and in the film he says that Futurama not existing is evened out by Lost not existing and he lists Lost as one of the bad things about America.
  • When Ouya is explaining his reason for creating the supercomputer, we get this jab at the system's popularity (or lack thereof):
    Ouya: I created computers in my image and sold them as video game machines. The plan was to put an Ouya in every home in the developed world, to create a global network of Bitcoin-generating machines.
    Detective Heart of America: And that worked?
    Ouya: No. Only eleven people ever purchased an Ouya.
• Totally Radical: Brendan, the cool guy, from The Final Freedom, based on the Kickstarter’s highest-level backer, is the epitome of this trope. He even comes from a previous world named “Slamzone” where acting as such was the norm.
• Unknown Rival: Heart of America doesn't even know Chess Mate exists until he shows up and starts talking about their rivalry like they're long-time enemies.
• Wholesome Crossdresser: When Pinnochio confronts Heart of America in The Final Freedom, he tells him to “put on [his] dress and go home”. Heart of America responds angrily, saying that there’s nothing wrong with dresses and that he’d even wear a dress himself. The next time they meet, he actually is, and everyone admits that it’s a very nice dress.