Trust Me, I'm a Genie (or Diego and Ziggy, as it is in the original French) is a decently obscure French cartoon from 2011. It follows the adventures of Diego (a camel) who is the master of Ziggy (a raccoon genie who resides in a soda can rather than an oil lamp) and their friends who have varying degrees of characterization. The kickoff of the premise is, as you might expect, a spin on the stereotypical "three wishes" concept: Diego's first and second wishes were a cafe and a swimming pool (which together act as the main setting of the series), but before he could make a third wish, he and his friends accidentally stepped on Ziggy's can. This got sand in it and made third wish defective, causing the object/s summoned by Ziggy to only indirectly be able to grant the third wish, leaving the rest of the work to Diego and Ziggy to sort out. The series follows Ziggy's futile attempts to grant said third wish and be set free.
(Note: All information on this page is derived solely from the English dub.)
A character sheet can be found here.
Tropes you'll find the the series:
- Accidental Kiss: At the end of "The Big Screen Kiss", Diego runs at a TV movie's simulacrum of Rita (him being inside the movie) in an attempt to kiss her; during this, the network pulls the movie, leaving Diego in a void of TV static and instead runs straight out of the TV and runs into Joe, executing the trope.
- Beam-O-War: Ziggy's magic beam (controlled by Diego's magic controller that controls Ziggy's body) versus the Eradicator's "Eradication Ray" at the climax of "The Eradicator". Ultimately serves as more of a referential sight gag, the scene being cut short. (Incidentally, the scene immediately afterward shows Zazie, Larry and Tony joining in on Diego's button mashing via the other 3 buttons on the controller. Combined with the Eradication Ray being an apparent insta-kill attack, this could also be considered of Press X to Not Die in the form of mashing all the face buttons.)
- Body Sled: In "More Ice, Please", episode antagonist Chuck (a large, muscle-built polar bear) dives for Ziggy, but misses and lands on a singular ski and slides away. Diego had landed on the other end of said ski just moments ealier, and was thus launched up into the air and onto Chuck as the latter slid downhill. However, very quickly the two launch off of a slope and land in the opposite order, Diego as the sled.
- Expository Theme Tune: The theme song is practically just the last two sentences of this page's summary.
- Freeing the Genie: Ziggy's overarching goal throughout the series; he will be freed if and only if he successfully grants Diego's third and last wish. Too bad the final wish always messes up.
- Genie in a Bottle: Ziggy. He's Sealed in a Can, literally.
- Girl Next Door Turned Superstar: In [GET EPISODE TITLE], Diego states that he and Rita went to school together ("Back to School" confirms this via time travel to said period). The romantic element manifests as Diego having a sort of Celeb Crush due to Rita, in her evident shallowness, taking him for granted.
- Incredible Shrinking Man: The premise of "Mini Diego", results from the consumption of the tomatoes of a plant Ziggy summoned. The intent of the original wish was to make Diego taller, but the tomatoes must be cooked into a soup first in order for that effect to take place, as the tomatoes shrink the consumer if eaten raw.
- Invocation: Ziggy, paired with a Transformation Sequence-like scene, when he attempts to grant the once-per-episode wish:
Ziggy: I call upon the powers that be... to grant this wish and set me free!
- Kent Brockman News: Scoop, who leans particularly hard into the Large Ham side of the trope.
- No Ontological Inertia: In "The Eradicator", Joe turning off the malfunctioning game console (which had summoned the titular video game boss into the real world) somehow also causes the magic controller Ziggy summoned to disappear.
- Pac Man Fever: "The Eradicator" is an episode about a video game. Trust Me, I'm a Genie! is an extremely prototypical cartoon from 2011. Put two and two together; the episode goes through basically all the typical elements of a Pac-Man Fever type depection of a video game. At least they use Xbox-type controllers instead of Atari joysticks.
- People Puppets: In "The Eradicator", the granted solution to Diego's wish to defeat the titular video game boss is a retro game controller that controls Ziggy's body. Significant tensile strain on the controller results in the Eradicator coming out of the nearby game console and trashing the oasis, leaving Diego to use the controller to defeat him... in real life.
- Reset Button Ending: In "Freedom at Last", Diego finally makes the most straightforward possible wish: to set Ziggy free. And in the end it actually works, albeit sacrificing Ziggy's genie abilities due to genie law forbidding a genie to re-contact anyone who has used all 3 of their wishes. All's well that ends well... except that Ziggy decided to snatch a wish-granting crystal ball from genie headquarters, landing him in trouble and causing the most recent wish to be canceled out - said wish being to free Ziggy. Not only that, but it's forbidden for Diego to make the same wish twice, meaning that he can't attempt the freedom wish again.
- Security Cling: Diego and Joe do this to each other in The Eradicator when the titular creature is brought to life.
- Strictly Formula: Diego has some problem, Ziggy tells him to use the final wish to fix said problem, the wish grants either the tools to fix the aforementioned problem or something only tangentially related to the problem, and the two spend the rest of the episode attempting to actually fix the problem but fail in the end.
- Three... Two... One...: In "Satellite TV", the main cast is having trouble with the cafe's TV reception. Ziggy blames it on Diego and tells him that if he had a "hi-tech satellite" while shaking his tail with his hand, obviously attempting to indirectly get Diego to use his third wish. Ziggy walks outside and away from the cafe and we see him count down from 4... and at 2, Diego runs after him to use his third wish.
- True Companions: The final episode drives this point straight home. Diego, Ziggy, Zazie, Joe, Tony, Larry and Sonia are so close as friends, they could be considered a family.
- World of Snark: Pretty much everyone who isn't Larry or Scoop has snarked at some point in the show. Ziggy, Joe and Sonia are by far the most prominent snarkers, though.
