YMMV / Macdonald Hall

• Breakout Character: Bruno and Boots' Distaff Counterparts Cathy and Diane and Lovable Nerd Elmer seem like a Satellite Character duo and a rival guest character in the first book, but were quite popular and quickly end up being constantly involved in the remaining books' hijinks while often getting their own subplots.
• Designated Villain: The developer from Beware the Fish having his car get wrecked twice in a row is played as being humorously karmic l, given how he wants to buy the school and tear it down to make apartments, but the school is going bankrupt through factors outside of his influence, and Elmer points out that if the developer doesn't buy the school then it's likely that a sewage treatment plant will be constructed on the land instead (which would be even worse for the girls at Miss Scrimmage’s next door).
• Growing the Beard: Go Jump in a Pool is often viewed as a step up from the first book for introducing a larger supporting cast having less blatant Protagonist-Centered Morality, and slightly increasing the whacky humor.
• Ho Yay: The way that Boots will stick by his best friend Bruno through thick and thin and the determination of both boys to avoid being separated causes them to be shipped with each other just as often as they are with their Distaff Counterparts and Implied Love Interests Cathy and Diane.
• Values Dissonance:
  • In Go Jump in a Pool, the final leg of the fundraising effort involves playing the stock market with methods that would now likely be classified as insider trading (the book was written in 1979, and current insider trading laws were only codified in the 1980s).
  • Macdonald Hall Goes Hollywood features both Stalker with a Crush behavior being Played for Laughs and a Brownface disguise by a young movie star attending a dance incognito.
• Values Resonance: In Macdonald Hall Goes Hollywood, Mr. Sturgeon refusing to let a vital member of the hockey team keep playing after he gets a concussion resonates far more than it did in 1991 after the increase in information about TBI that athletes can suffer when they are concussed multiple times in a row.