YMMV / Sam & Max

aka: Sam And Max Freelance Police

If you're looking for the YMMV of the TV show, click here.

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• Adaptation Displacement: The relatively child-friendly games and cartoons are much better known than the original (darker) comics.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Since the violence was toned down in the cartoon, Max ended up becoming more of a good-natured Cloud Cuckoo Lander than the violence-crazed private eye that we know and love.
  • That said, he's still pretty detached from what we traditionally consider "reality", even when he's allowed to be violent. And, conversely, just because the violence was "toned down" doesn't mean he's a fluffy ball of cuddles, either.
    • To quote Max in the cartoon: "The simulated 3D carnage makes me tingle like a prom queen!".
    • And he still sneaks in lines like this:
  Max: What, no concealable weaponry, road flares, or black capsules? What if we get captured!?
  Sam: Ha ha! You kill me, little buddy!
  Max: (quietly) Only if we're taken alive, Sam.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Indian Poker does indeed exist.
• Awesome Music: How about a song and dance on how war is Good For You?
  • The music for the final battle with Hugh Bliss at the very end of Season 1.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The War Song from "Abe Lincoln Must Die!"

  Sam: Well...
  Max: Let's not do that again.

  • This being Sam & Max, it was done on purpose. The first game, Sam & Max Hit the Road had a similar song-out-of-nowhere.
  • Also...Banang!
    • Which reappears twice in "Beyond the Alley of the Dolls".
    • Then later in both Poker Night at the Inventory and its sequel Poker Night 2.
  • Played for laughs. In Sam & Max Hit the Road, while fighting for the phone, Sam flings Max out the window, then talks to the commissioner. While he's talking Max comes in through the door, and nonchalantly and asks Sam what the mission was. Being tossed out a third story window is humorously never brought up.
• Broken Base:
  • The voices, since each series has a different set, though it's not unexpected given how long-running the franchise is, and it's also become a sort of Running Gag in the fandom itself.
  • Some fans were mad about the bowdlerization of the 2020 remaster of Sam and Max Save the World, pointing out Skunkape Games promised not to cut any dialogue and skirted around the issue for a while. Other fans thought the edited jokes have aged particularly badly and weren't sorry to see them go.
• Cliché Storm: The videogame made by the COPS, which is just Tic-Tac-Toe.
  Bob: The year is 2048. In a post-apocalyptic galaxy run by giant corporations, you are a cybernetically enhanced space marine with no memory of his past. Are you the chosen one foretold by prophecy? Do you have the strength to survive...
  Bluster Blaster: Tic... Tac... DOOM!
• Creepy Cute: Max's rabbity ears and fluffy white fur are somewhat at odds with his huge mouth full of sharklike teeth.
• Critical Dissonance: "Moai Better Blues" is one of the best reviewed episodes in the Freelance Police series. Fans, however, tend to be more divided. With some complaining about the limited locales and rather obscure puzzles once you reach the "Secret Underground Cave."
• Crosses the Line Twice: A whole lot of the jokes, but think about this: Sam and Max have an entire wing of hell dedicated to them, and filled with all the people they've sent there, intentionally or accidentally.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Fans on the Telltale forums love Papierwaite, and Jurgen is also quite popular. Also Sal, who is rather friendly and lovable for a giant cockroach.
  • Also the C.O.P.S
  • Bosco is also pretty popular for being absolutely hilarious.
• Genius Bonus/ Viewers Are Geniuses:
  • The opening for episode 305 is an obvious homage to "Space 1999." Well, if you've seen it before...and the majority of the Sam & Max target audience probably hasn't.
  • A less egregious example would be the line "To the moon, Alice!" in 106.
  • A throwaway joke in 204 between Sam and Max has Max mention wanting to take the spaceship they're in on a joyride to Whitley Streiber's house to screw with him.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • In the comic book, when Max wonders what it's like to die, Sam murders Max, played for comedy. Then come Season 3, Max is killed, not played for comedy.
  • In Episode 204, Chariots For the Dogs, Sam mentions that Max has hung up his halo...
  • Episode 305 creates just a lot of these in general.
  • The parallels between "Fools Die On Friday" of the animated series and the 9/11 attacks are so eerie that when Gametap streamed the series, this was the only episode that wasn't made available.
  • The depiction of hell in 205, What's New Beelzebub was based on Tell Tale Games's own office made for some nice Self-Deprecation. Jump to September 2018, in wake of Telltale Games's closure and how the workers were treated however made into what the conditions were like working there.
  • After Donald Trump's divisive term as President of the United States (which included him being the first president to be impeached twice, with debatable legality on the second occasion), some fans found it harder to laugh at the jokes about the chaos Max causes after being elected president in "Abe Lincoln Must Die!", which leads to multiple attempts to impeach him.
  • That being said, the entire second half of Season 1 feels much harsher in hindsight after Donald Trump's presidency. The main antagonist of "Abe Lincoln Must Die!", a White House Secret Service agent called Chuckles who attempted to use the puppet President of the United States to hypnotize the entire country, appears very similar to figures like Michael Flynn and Stephen Bannon who used their position as Trump's associates to push far-right ideology, and were involved in numerous shady schemes. In "Reality 2.0", people are now being hypnotized through the Internet, which is eerily reminiscent of the infamous online cult known as QAnon (Flynn was also involved with it). Finally, "Bright Side of the Moon" reveals that a New Age esoteric guru was the mastermind behind it all, which ties into the New Agey overtones of QAnon, as well as Bannon's fascination with far-right occultists like Julius Evola and Aleksandr Dugin.
  • In the animated series episode They Came From Down There, Mack Salmon tries to take Max's brain to make him a slave, it fails. Fast forward to The Devil's Playhouse episode 3, They Stole Max's Brain!, and we see the frightening effect of what could have happened if Mack had succeeded.
  • In one episode, Sam and Max take in a little boy with uncontrolled psychic powers, who was being used by the military as a superweapon, and Hilarity Ensues. His powers are disturbingly similar to the more seriously handled ones gained by Max in The Devil's Playhouse, and it's not helped by the fact that the duo use him while crimefighting as a psychic weapon.
  • In The Final Episode, Sam and Max try to recall how they met The Geek. Max recalls being a Pharaoh. In The Devil's Playhouse, Max's body gets possessed by the Pharaoh Sammun-Mak who dresses almost exactly the same way Max remembered being dressed as the flashback - and the season establishes that Max is a multidimensional Hive Mind, adding in a great recipe for Fan Wank.
  • Max's overblown parody of dramatic death scenes in the third episode of Save the World becomes a little hard to watch after he actually dies in the final episode of The Devil's Playhouse.
  • The loading screen animation for The Devil's Playhouse is basically Max's head, on fire. This becomes much less funny after the climax of "The City That Dares Not Sleep", in which Max's head catches fire from psychic overexertion shortly before he explodes. It's unclear though if that was the Maimtrons or Max.
  • The following lines of the World Of Max song from the end credits of Season 1 are either this or Hilarious in Hindsight depending on whether or not you sympathize with The Narrator:
  A conscience is a curiously useless abnormality
  A useless abnormality, a useless abnormality
  A growth, of sorts. A growth of sorts.
  • Similarly, all the jokes about Max's self-loathing in Seasons 1 and 2 become less funny when it turns out The Narrator, his Superego, legitimately hates him and wants him dead.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The animated series, Santa Claus appears in his typical, jolly role, but when he was included in the games, he was very noticeably less jolly.
  • In one episode, there's an evil dummy from an old TV Show, granted it's the evil half, but, in The Devil's Playhouse: ''Beyond the Alley of the Dolls', the main antagonist of the episode is an evil Ventriloquist's dummy called Charlie Ho-Tep.
  • Max: "Glad to know my skull is threaded for easy access!" So that explains Max's Severed Head...
  • Disney, where series creator Steve Purcell currently works, now owns both LucasArts and Marvel (some of the comics were published under Epic Comics, Marvel's creator-owned label.
    • On a related note, that Bill Farmer voices Sam in Hit The Road. It's almost impossible to hear Farmer's Sam say Max's name without thinking of Goofy.
  • In the first episode of the cartoon, Sam and Max encounter a locked door, in which the person on the other side says "What's the password? And if you say Swordfish, I'll lose it!!" in the Telltale game episode "The Mole, The Mob and the Meatball" Sam can attempt to answer Swordfish as a password.
  • One of the dialogues of Ice Station Santa talks about Max wanting a "My Semi-Attractive Pony" doll, with an optional extra dialogue of both Sam and Him sincerely discussing their favorite pony. While these games did not predate My Little Pony as a franchise, it did predate the surprise popularity of the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic series, and the resulting Brony fandom.
  • In Day of the Tentacle in one hallway of the Colonial Edison mansion along the wall of historial presidential figures is Max in colonial clothing. ^note  at the time Lucasarts had a running gag of inserting Max cameos in as many games as they could Here he is yet again associated with Presidents.
• Ho Yay: Sam and Max' relationship is practically oozing this a lot of times. Max is repeatedly stated to "not even like girls", which he always confirms and in every incarnation of the series he's shown to be very interested in a lot of the male characters, Sam included. Then there's the fact that he often jumps Sam, claiming it to be how he shows his affection and that he flat-out calls him "damn tasty" at one point. Sam meanwhile is shown to care a whole lot for Max, to the point where him getting hurt, captured or put in any kind of danger is one of his Berserk Buttons. He also considers himself "off the market" relationship-wise and since all the female characters in the series are either not interested, way too young for him or taken, one could interpret that line as him talking about Max. When Steve Purcell was asked if Sam and Max were in love, he responded they were like, "Butch and Sundance".
• Idiosyncratic Ship Naming: Freelance Husbands has caught on as a name for the Sam/Max pairing.
• LGBT Fanbase: A massive one sprung up during the late 2010s and early 2020s when many new fans took notice of how Ambiguously Gay Sam and Max are. This led to a big Newbie Boom in response, particularly when Save the World Remastered was released.
• Like You Would Really Do It:
  • The consequences of psychic power use was foreshadowed clearly throughout The Devil's Playhouse, but who would've believed that there wouldn't be a last-minute save or sudden wacky solution or Deus ex Machina? You get a grim 10-minute closing sequence to ruminate on that.
  • Max's death in "Bad Day on the Moon."
• Magnificent Bastard: Sam is the more rational member of the Freelance Police duo. Armed with little more than his gun, Sam alongside Max regularly take advantage of anything in the area to overcome adversaries, often using their own resources to outwit or kill them. Despite being motivated to stop crime, Sam is perfectly willing to harm innocents in his pursuit of justice, such as manipulating his friend Sybil into causing a political scandal to ruin their opponents' reputation, causing the young Timmy Two-Teeth to be sent to Hell in order to sabotage the operations of Satan, or having Sal abducted and eaten by a monstrous Max to have him help cure Max from inside. Always ready with a quip or a trick up his sleeve, Sam will go through any trial to save the day, even if it means creating some chaos of his own.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "You crack me up little buddy" is very quotable. It's pretty common to have the quote said in Sam and Max videos.
  • The "BANANG!!!" running gag is loved for its pure weirdness and being out of nowhere, even for a series like this.
  • "All we have to do is destroy the Internet and all our problems are solved." ^ExplanationAn out of context quote from Max in "Reality 2.0" used as a "No. Just… No" Reaction to the Internet in general.
  • "Look at that. Isn't it ridiculous? Maybe it will leave if we all laugh at it." ^ExplanationA quote from Sam from the one-page comic "Our Bewildering Universe"◊, referring to a tapir.
• Moral Event Horizon: From Season 2's finale:
  Max: Well if that doesn't get us into hell, nothing will.
  • Since it's about destroying a building with several people in it, including a dying child (whom Sam and Max will make sure gets to Hell), in order to raise a killer robot... That also counts as Crossing the Line Twice.
    • The "people" in that building were rats. Sentient ones, but most people wouldn't care.
  • At first, it was pretty hard to take Hugh Bliss seriously as a villain... at least until he separated Max's bliss by severing his hand, tearing out his stomach, and ripping off his tail.
    • Particularly when he finally really snaps and screams "DIE, BUNNY" before attacking Max, who'd been one of his biggest fans until right then. This is one of the only times in the games where Sam doesn't hesitate to shoot a villain.
  • Damning Santa Claus's soul to Hell, although they did bring him back.
    • The episode where they bring him back actually reveals that there's a whole wing of Hell devoted to people who Sam & Max have, either directly or indirectly, had a hand in the death of; even relatively blameless victims get sent here, so Sam & Max's involvement is the only relevant factor.
• Polished Port: Bowdlerization aside, the HD remaster of Save the World truly is a masterpiece. In addition to updating the graphics and remastering the music (along with making the audio cleaner in general), the new version also added some quality-of-life additions. In addition to having the standard save function, each episode also has a chapter select. Controlling Sam has also been made easier, as you can now hold the mouse button down to make him move, rather than repeatedly clicking. Sam can also run.
• Porting Disaster: If you have any other option available to you, don't play the Wii ports of seasons 1 and 2. The frame-rate will suddenly drop down to the teens, or single digits, on the drop of a hat. Certain sequences are almost literal slide-shows. Additionally, the controls were not adjusted to compensate for the fact that you're using a Wiimote, not a mouse. Mix in many instances of lines that didn't fully load in time for their cue (or may be outright missing), visual and auditory glitches aplenty, and many, many painfully downscaled textures, and you've got yourself a point-and-click adventure which is both difficult and a literal pain to play.
• Tear Jerker: Max's presumed death at the end of Season 3. Even if he didn't die, it would still be impossible for him to return to Sam. Luckily, his alternate reality self is still there to fill the gap of his present self. He even waves goodbye to Sam before teleporting away for the last time.
  • When Papierwaite tells Sam that Max's tumor became infected with dark matter and they won't be able to operate normally, instead of stepping back from the problem and trying to think of a solution like he normally would, he weakly, almost childishly, asks if Papierwaite can "make it better." This being Sam & Max, he obviously immediately follows with another hilarious quip; but he sounds so defeated when he says this, it cranks Sam's woobie factor up to eleven.
  • Sam's reaction to Dr. Mama Bosco's cloning machine failing to revive Max. There's a brief moment where it looks like he's about to snap and go Noir again but then he raises his head all the way and just breaks. None of his allies can look him in the eye and he just wanders off into the city aimlessly, too heartbroken to even feel rage, ignoring even crimes in progress he would have relished busting with Max until he finally comes to a stop looking over the bay at the Statue of Liberty, the last place he and Max were ever together. He takes off his hat in mourning, looking more lost than the player could imagine, before putting it back on. The only thing stopping the whole season, and the franchise thus far at the time, from closing on the mother of all Downer Endings is the Alternate Max arriving in the Time Elevator because he lost ''his'' Sam. Thanks to the animated series establishing Max as a Multiversal Hive-Mind, this also means it's not a case of Replacement Goldfish too.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Some fans' reactions to the announcement that Season 3 would replace the Point-and-Click interface with a controller/touch friendly one, similar to Wallace & Gromit.
    • Also, the complaint that Max's Future Vision makes the puzzles too easy.
  • Bill Farmer and Nick Jameson not voicing Sam and Max. Telltale tried to get them to voice said characters, but they couldn't.
  • Save the World: Remastered removed or changed several jokes that might be considered too offensive in today's time, after the developers denied any accusations of censorship. Bosco was also redubbed with a new actor^note with the developers stating that they weren't comfortable with a black character being voiced by a non-black actor, whose performance has been criticized for sounding plain and not capturing the performance of the original.
• Ugly Cute: Sam Jr. in 305.
  • Sal might also count, if only because he's so gosh-darn lovable despite being a six-foot tall cockroach.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • One of the questionable ingredients in Cooking without Looking is MSG, the health concerns of which have since been shown to be the result of poor testing.
  • "Abe Lincoln Must Die" was released in 2007, and it thus has a very 2007 portrayal of the President Of The United States: He's portrayed as having a thick southern accent and somewhat passive demeanor, clearly spoofing how then-president George W. Bush and his two predecessors were Southerners with not-so-subtle accents. This trend was broken two years later, when the Hawaii-born Barack Obama took office.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: The comic books. Colorful and cheerily illustrated funny animals on the cover, squeaky clean enough to pass the most stringent Moral Guardians...but openly incites any minors that will no doubt get their hands on it.
  • For that matter, the games themselves as well. Most of them were rated T, and include quite a bit of swearing and innuendos. Not too extreme, but some might still not want younger kids to be playing them. At most, the Cartoon show is the only property in the franchise that was made with children in mind.
  Max: I never dreamed we could have so much fun and still be suitable for young viewers.
• The Woobie: Everything that's happened to Max by the end of 305. First of all, he's forced to electrocute himself by his own best friend - you can actually hear him screaming in pain while it's happening. Second, the electrocution leaves him with severe brain damage, which means he loses most of his memory and is made even more simple than before - so he's left doing nothing but happily grinning and mumbling for the rest of the episode, even as Sam struggles to restore it. Third...and this is the real Tear Jerker...at the very end, his head really does catch fire, and when the last Maimtron hits, you realize he's actually on the verge of genuinely exploding, just as he's been warned about from the very beginning. Again, you can hear him crying out in pain; the absolutely heartbreaking expression on his face makes it clear that he's suddenly realized what's happening. The very last you see of him is a small wave goodbye to Sam before he teleports off to spare the city.
  • The events of 305 do quite a number on Sam too. All he wanted to do was save Max... and he failed. You can tell by the end just how physically and emotionally defeated he is. When you get right down to it this is someone who has just watched his best friend sacrifice himself to save everyone else.
  • Also Sal. Over the course of three episodes he is fired from his job at Stinky’s kitchen, gets repeatedly beaten by space gorillas and clones of Sam, swallowed whole by Giant Max, and then finally killed by radiation poisoning during the Grand Finale. Please note that Sam and Max are the ones responsible for most of the aforementioned events happening to him.

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