Britney has simultaneously been lambasted by fans for being a Mary-Sue and praised for being a likable Mary-Sue who gets Hidden Depths later on. The show itself can't quite decide whether or not Britney is a likeable character at times, during her return in season 5.
Blaine gets bashed by some for his cloying relationship with Clover. However, some fans do see him as the almost perfect match for Clover.
Mandy, even on this wiki. The Jerks Are Worse Than Villains page has an entry that claims that Mandy is "the most hated character" by viewers, even compared to real villains. But in this page, according to the Draco in Leather Pants entry, "most fans" think she is not that bad and want her to become friends with the main girls. This shows how divisive her character is.
Broken Base: Whether or not the show's largely formulaic nature works for or against it.
Catharsis Factor: After five seasons of Jerry WOOHP'ing the girls to his office to give them a mission, using humiliating and uncomfortable methods, and usually doing it at inconvenient times for them. Seeing Sam, Alex and Clover finally getting the chance to WOOHP Jerry for a change in "Evil Pizza Guys" is awesome. He does not care for the experience, but he had it coming.
Common Knowledge: This show is memetically infamous for being a "fetish show", when in reality it was a lot closer to your run-of-the-mill episodic action comedy; while the girls are subject to quite a bit of Fanservice, much of the "fetish" content is typical scenarios and tropes found in plenty of other cartoons and media.
Helga Von Guggen is a greedy fashion designer who makes "seamless" fur coats by kidnapping innocent people, injecting them with a serum that turns them into Beast Folk, then skinning them alive in what appears to be a giant industrial crusher. She makes her debut having already done this to a boat with two hundred people on board, bragging about one of her coats, claiming that it's "genuine lawyer." She later designs a line of apparel that crushes people who wear them, with heavy implications that it manages to kill an innocent shopper off-screen in the opening minutes of the episode it was introduced.
"Stuck in the Middle Ages with You": The unnamed Black Knight is in fact a modern aged and misogynistic young man, descending from a royal lineage. Seeking to restore his ancestors' former power and rule the modern world, the Black Knight uncovers time travel, and abducts military scientists and personnel to the Middle Ages and control the destructive Kill SatE.N.D. to overthrow a past benevolent king. As the Black Knight, he aims to become a warmongering tyrant, leading attacks on the kingdom, using E.N.D. to decimate the King's knights, threatening to destroy his castle and village unless he hands over his crown. Upon taking over, the Black Knight plans to further conquer the medieval world, starting off by having E.N.D. fire upon a village, setting it ablaze.
"Creepy Crawly Much?": Max Exterminus was a successful but disgruntled exterminator, who decided to instead to lead and rule over all bugs if he couldn't exterminate them. Taking to gene splicing, Exterminus mutates himself into an insectoid hybrid to lead swarms of insects, and plans to wipe out all non-bug life on Earth and rule over what's left. Raiding military bases for their data, Exterminus creates a rocket filled with weaponized bug venom, planning to launch it into the Earth's jet stream and poison the atmosphere. Taking a lecherous fixation on Alex, Exterminus attempts to forcibly mutate her to be his "Queen" as he launches his rocket, making a remark about the larvae they'll have together in the new world.
Crazy Is Cool: The villains themselves may not seem crazy on surface, but nine times out of ten, their evil schemes are insane.
Eisenstein created replicas of world leaders in order to turn national landmarks into theme park rides.
Simon Tucker kidnaps entire sections of shopping malls via underground tunnels, and brainwashes the shoppers into a boomerang swinging army to tear down capitalism one mall at a time.
Helga Von Guggen set up an elaborate island base and kidnapped an entire cruiseliner, then mutated the passengers into animals for the purpose of making seamless fur coats for her next fashion line. Later using an alias she makes clothes that are made to eventually squeeze whoever is wearing them to death. (She actually murdered multiple people for fashion.)
Jerry's morals are rather questionable towards the spies, as he sometimes puts them into situations that could have easily killed them had it been real life.
There's also the fact that he had been sending minor teenage girls on extremely dangerous missions that could have easily gotten them hurt or worse, and in "The Amazing Spiez!", he sends even younger middle school kids (The Clarks) on the very same missions as well.
There is also the fact that in the movie, he practically forced the girls into joining W.O.O.H.P., despite saying it was their choice but actively ruining their lives until they complied. It makes one wonder just how many W.O.O.H.P. agents are legitimately working for WOOHP by "choice", anyway.
His treatment of the girls in Season 1 episode "The Fugitives" arguably crosses the line from being ethically ambiguous into outright cruelty, attempting to have behavioral modification chips forcibly implanted in their heads after they're framed for a crime spree. Given the fact that Jerry doesn't even bother to hear them out when they protest their innocence, it's a wonder W.O.O.H.P. can be considered the good guys after all this.
He forces the girls (and the Clarks) to keep their spying secret from their parents. When the girls' mothers discover that their kids are spies (Thanks to Jerry) in “Totally Busted” their mothers were within their rights to pull their daughters out of W.O.O.H.P.. Later when the girls need help from W.O.O.H.P. to save their moms, Jerry (and G.L.A.D.I.S.) lock them out completely, leaving the girls having to rescue their mothers with hardware supplies.
Jerry also dismisses what the girls actually want. One example is in “Solo Spies” Jerry gives them what he thinks is a promotion (making them Solo Spies). The girls tell Jerry they don’t want this (and instead see this as a form of punishment) and tell Jerry they want to stay together but he forces them to become solo spies with them only one gadget each to complete a mission. He also sells their penthouse to Mandy which forces them to live in the West Coast Hall dorm rooms (something else they don’t want). Sam and Clover’s rooms have rats and a leaky roof and while Alex’s room is fine she only has a small box and her pet pig with her. Later in the episode because they are all alone all three get kidnapped. They are able to work together and finish their case. The girls still rightfully miffed at Jerry until he gives in and let’s them live and spy together... But he doesn’t apologize to them at all.
The girls' mothers were likely not meant to seem unbearable in “Totally Busted.” They were within their rights pull their daughters out of W.O.O.H.P. after all. But instead of listening to their daughters' point of view they just punish them throughout the three-parter. The girls had the spy life chosen for them by their boss, Jerry but the moms barely call him out preferring to punish the girls. During this, thanks to to a villain’s serum, Mandy and her friends turned into Spy Assassins. The girls HAVE to continue spying because Mandy and her friends are trying to KILL them. When Sam Alex and Clover are trying to figure out what’s going on, the moms tell their daughters they can’t hang out anymore. When the moms are later kidnapped by Mandy and girls go to save them (with no help from WOOHP). They get yelled at yet again! It’s only when the moms are back on the ground thanks to the girls using their jumpers as parachutes that their moms FINALLY let up. Even then the girls' mothers are never called out for how they acted or apologize to their kids.
Designated Villain: Sometimes, Mandy gets unfair treatment when she, while generally obnoxious, hasn't actually done anything outwardly antagonistic to the Spies; this includes when she's trying to be nice.
Draco in Leather Pants: Tim Scam, Sam gets a brief crush on his spy boss persona and she’s shipped with him to this day.
Mandy, although she’s not that bad most of the time. Heck when she briefly becomes a nice person for some episodes, most fans want it to stick so she can be friends with the spies. Her, Sam, Alex and Clover even ARE friends for part of an episode and it’s a wonderful episode. Mandy and Sam are also a very popular ship in the fandom.
Escapist Character: The Spies are all extremely beautiful, wealthy, and fashionable girls with lots of hot guys and girls into them. They get to skip school practically every day to go on globe trotting adventures. They also live in a fantasy version of Beverly Hills, and later attend a posh school in Malibu. Heck sometimes Jerry uses W.O.O.H.P. connections to give them perks.
Fanon: It's commonly accepted among the fandom that Sam, Clover, and Alex are not single in the future they traveled to, they are just dating each other at this point.
Fanon Discontinuity: Mainly because Season 5's finale gave the show a lot of closure, and actually ended the show on a high note. So fans pretend that Season 6 didn’t happen.
Some fans even go as far as to ignore everything after Season 2, closure be damned.
Sam and recurring villain Tim Scam also seems to be a popular ship among the fans, given that it takes up a good chunk of the Totally Spies archive on FF.net.
"Space Much?" features an asteroid about to crash down in Moscow. In 2013, the Chelyabinsk meteor exploded in Russia.
Both "The Way You Play the Game" and "The Incredible Bulk" involve villains using artificial muscle enhancers. Not something that's all-too-funny these days with the increased awareness of steroid abuse and its side effects (especially when one victim from the former is clearly in pain due to the treatment).
The names are even spelled in similar ways; it's like someone on Valve was a fan of the show.
On January 28, 2019, someone added a Totally Spies!page to the Universal Kids wiki (which is filled with false information to begin with), even though the show wasn't aired on that channel at the time. Come June 2019, it was revealed that the show started airing on Universal Kids on June 24. Talk about unintentional foresight.
Clover's nickname for her cousin Normie became this when it's one of the well-known internet slangs.
The beginning of the very first episode has a brief misunderstanding where Clover calls Sam her best friend, mildly offending Alex. Later seasons would have running gags dedicated to Clover and Sam inches away from physical altercations over who was Alex's best friend.
Arnold Jackson is drawn with a similar art style and facial features compare to the other love interests. Apparently his glasses and freckles are so disgusting that the girls are repulsed by the thought of dating him. He may not dress well but fans don’t get why he’s seen as ugly.
The Model Citizens episode falls under this too: Tuesday Tate's minions are said to be unattractive (and needing their features swapped out with the kidnapped models) but most of them, even before the complete makeover already look cute (unless they've had their work done like the girl who got Clover's legs). Clover (muscular pear shaped lower half swapped out with her slender frame), Sam (gets braces and freckles), and Alex (gets her sleek black bob swapped with a frizzy red hairdo) and the kidnapped models don't look any less attractive.
Comes up less than the former listed but Mandy once trashed a girl for having very wide hips while wearing hip huggers. Granted Mandy is an Alpha Bitch and could be making mean comments for shits and giggles.
Clover in "Model Citizens" with her slender lower half swapped out for one with rounded hips and thick, muscular calves is this, because she's regarded as having been deformed and as "stout".
Just Here for Godzilla: Even the show's haters watch just to fulfill a fetish of theirs.
A retroactive one. It's now pretty common for lesbian/bi/pansexual teenage girls and young women who grew up with this show to comment that they really loved watching it "for some reason." As at least one put it, "I finally figured it out!" Aside from the sexual aspects, the heavy Les Yay attracted many queer girls as well.
The extreme Camp, occasional male fanservice and some very flamboyantAmbiguously Gay characters has made it popular with gay men as well.
Sam declaring that she'll use a can opener to open a door became one, courtesy of one Mr. Enter.
After Totally Spies! went off the air, it became common to joke◊ about the show just being a fetish show due to the large number of kinks it contained, from tentacles to mud to brainwashing/hypnosis to shrinking/growth.
Memetic Troll: One wonders how Jerry gets anything else done with all the time he must spend finding new and ridiculous ways to 'WOOHP' the Spies to his office. If he doesn't have a new one for the episode, nobody gets WOOHPed at all.
Helga Von Guggen did this by killing two hundred people on a boat and making fur coats out of them. Worse still, it's her Establishing Character Moment.
Just try to take Muffy Peprich from "Evil Sorority" seriously as a villain when she makes threats in a scratchy, high-pitched voice.
The Spies face a stampede of furious zoo animals in "Animal World." The only problem? They've been 'uplifted' and are all walking on two feet, inspiring laughter instead of fear.
The Surgeon from Escape From W.O.O.H.P. Island is a disturbing villain, but listing a mad plastic surgeon (who knows karate) off on the same threat level as planet destroying Kaiju and a man-eating alien is just laughable.
Narm Charm: The show presents fashion, girl scout cookies, and dating as Serious Business worthy of world domination, and is all the more fun because of it.
Nausea Fuel: Alex throwing up and Jerry burping in "The Yuck Factor".
One True Threesome: Sam/Alex/Clover ship. It doesn't help that most of the boys the three are interested in tend to be one-shots, bar their fellow spy Blaine.
Paranoia Fuel: W.O.O.H.P. can get the girls from anywhere.
The Problem with Licensed Games: Several of them. Two games on Game Boy Advance, three on Nintendo DS, and a party game for the Playstation 2. None of them were all that great.
The Scrappy: G.L.A.D.I.S. was added to be Jerry's assistant, but was written out of the show due to fan complaints. Her overall role in the show was relatively pointless and her voice was deemed rather annoying.
The show's premise has three girls in LA taking down villains and kicking butt while working for a male employer which makes it an animated adaptation of Charlie's Angels but with a spy agency instead of the Los Angeles Police Department.
In "Freaky Circus Much?", the titular freaky circus is run by a mutant ringmaster who was born with four arms. The Spies themselves also mutate in this episode: Sam gets a crab claw for a hand, while Clover turns into a human-elephant hybrid, and Alex becomes an amphibian creature.
The villain of "Green With N.V." uses her own sweat as the main ingredient of her man controlling fragrance, which she produces by sitting fully clothed in a sweat box.
Testosterone Brigade: When a female-targeted kids' show has Fanservice as much as this one does, it's bound to pick up a lot of male fans along the way.
The voice actors for the English dub being replaced with sound-alike Canadians has been somewhat controversial. While Jennifer Hale and Andrea Baker having dual citizenship with Canada that allowed them to resume voicing Sam/Mandy and Clover, the voices of Alex and Jerry were changed with voices that were noticeable. Katie Griffin would voice Alex with a more raspy and high-pitched voice than Katie Leigh; while Adrian Truss is actually British-born and has a voice more fitting for Jerry than Jess Harnell, Harnell's Jerry and Truss's Jerry don't even sound like they're from the same region of England, much less the same person.
In 2023, it was announced that none of the original English voice actors would be returning for season 7 due to Executive Meddling.
Seth Toyman, a villain from season 2, was a pretty unique one, since while he did steal microchips for his toys, all he wanted was for them to be super realistic. He had no idea they would end up as monsters, so he helps the spies not only escape from his killer toys, but gets them out of a horrible trap set up by them too. By the end of the episode, he accepts that what he did was wrong and gets arrested. The girls remind Jerry that Seth did help them on their mission, so Jerry decides that instead of jail time, Seth will do community service, much to everyone's delight. Come season 6, Seth makes a complete 180 from his original counterpart, his sympathetic traits are gone in favor of being a one-note criminal. He now comes across as an immature teenager as opposed to the rational adult he was before the change, much to the fans dismay. Seriously, the contrast between season 2 Seth and season 6 Seth is so grand they may as well have been different characters.
Most of the villains who appear in this show. Despite having admittedly interesting gimmicks, they come off as bland and one-dimensional due to having the same excuse to turning evil. It doesn't help that almost every episode has a different villain, meaning we're stuck with more or less the same villain for over a hundred episodes.
Kyle Katz is Totally Spies's answer to Cat Woman and Black Cat (An Attractive, cat-themed thief that flirts with the main heroes). He's shown to be pretty competent by using his good looks to his advantage and is constantly getting the upper hand whenever the girls try to capture him. Unfortunately, his motivations and backstory are never shown unlike other episode-centered villains, which is quite damning since he never makes an appearance after "The Sauvest Spy".
WOOHP is a huge organisation with hundreds, if not thousands, of agents. And yet the best the show gives us are Jerry's old team (Pam, Alice, and Crimson) and B.O.B, neither of which return. It would have been interesting to see episodes where we encounter more of these agents and see how they interact with the girls.
Blaine. After a Season 5 arc where he discover he's a freelance agent to Geraldine, he's sent to WOOHP's Australia branch, with Clover reverting to her usual boy-crazy self. Even when Blaine returns in Season 6 (with an unfortunate redesign), we don’t know why they broke up, and Blaine’s reason for not wanting to get back together seemed bogus and forced (he dated Mandy.)
The introduction of LAMOS (League Aiming to Menace and Overthrow Spies) in Season 4 can be considered this. Only five out of the hundreds of villains the spies faced are part of it, and LAMOS only appears in 5 episodes out of 26.
In "Totally Busted!", we learn about the spy gene, meaning the girls' parents used to be spies. It would've been the perfect opportunity to explore the mothers' past as spies; doing so would have given them a reason to put an end to the girls' spy careers as well as some much-needed Character Development throughout the course of the special.
Hell, we barely get to see the spies' families. If the show devoted more time to showing and fleshing them out, "Totally Busted!" wouldn't have been needlessly forced and mean-spirited.
In “The Incredible Bulk” when Alex was told she might be stuck as a Amazonian Beauty for a while longer due the bars not being intended for woman to consume, it could’ve opened an interesting plot twist. As when Alex’s bodybuilder boyfriend (who she saved from getting gruesomely killed from those bulky bars), promptly dumped her due to disliking girls who are stronger him, this could’ve motivated Alex to stay muscular through actual daily training and perhaps residual effects of the bulky bars being permanent. Which might’ve been really handy, as a brawny Alex could’ve dealt with situations that require some extra strength and acted as some character development for her. Especially since it would fit Alex given she is the athlete of the team. Heck this subplot could’ve come eventually back to show the jerk who dumped her that stronger women are pretty awesome.
Tough Act to Follow: The show's spin-off, The Amazing Spiez!, basically had no chance of topping it in terms of popularity, so it was no surprise when the show was canceled rather quickly and didn’t last nearly as long as its predecessor.
Toy Ship: Although they've never officially met, Clover's cousin Normie and the President's daughter Madison are a popular couple due to their similar bratty personalities and debuting in consecutive episodes in season 2.
Throughout "Evil Bouquets Are Sooo Passe", Clover holds a petty grudge against Sam for dating her ex Fernando — after the latter just needed help with her Brazil report — and in the end Sam dumps him so she can stay friends with Clover. It seems the conflict of that episode was hastily resolved just to keep Clover in the right.
Despite being treated like a Reasonable Authority Figure, Jerry almost obsessively summons the Spies in the most uncomfortable and embarrassing ways (even balking at the idea of doing it otherwise), has shown little regard for their privacy, and has on separate occasions tried to lobotomize them on very little evidence, refused to help them in many episodes and fired them just because he'd gotten his original team back.
Also "Game Girls" has an Asian villainess named "Lady Dragon". This was bad enough in the 2000s, but it would never come close to being approved today.
"Passion Patties" could definitely come off as body-shaming in modern times, especially with Clover panicking about wearing a large sized hat and temporarily becoming Fat Comic Relief.
Alex in "Alex Gets Schooled," where her parents send her to a British boarding school where she is bullied and eventually turned into a dolphin-like abomination. This was all because of her supposed bad grades, only for it to turn out that it was a mix-up the whole time.
Also, in "Boy Bands Will Be Boy Bands," where her favorite singer ends up betraying her and forcing her to switch faces with his hag of a manager, as well as the b-plot involving Mandy bullying her.
A general one for Alex if the Alternative Character Interpretation is correct; she has such low self-confidence that she automatically assumes that it's only a matter of time before Sam and Clover decide they'd rather have the more capable Britney and kick her to the curb. (Or Alex could be worried Jerry would fire her, with Sam, Clover and Britney unable to change his mind).
Also the ending of "The Incredible Bulk". In that episode she had fallen in love with a handsome body builder who liked her back and went to extreme lengths to save him after the Villain of the Week gave him a bar that turned him into a hulking monster and addicted to the very bars that would have eventually killed him. She sacrificed her petite figure by eating these very bars in order to gain extreme muscles to defeat the villain and save him and the others but her boyfriend ends up DUMPING her for the extremely shallow reason that he doesn't like girls who are stronger than him, not caring that she had saved his life...and the fact that her own friends continue to crack jokes about her new build doesn't really help. You really just want to give Alex a hug after that, especially given that out of the three girls, she has the least active dating life.
Anytime Sam goes for anything academic or has a “nerdy” hobby she wants to try she has to deal with Alex and Clover either making fun the hobby or her. Seeing as she has no other friends her only option for support at these events is Alex and Clover, who make it clear they don’t want to be there.
Woolseyism: Considering all the different language dubs, it's bound to happen at least once.
In the Mandarin Chinese Dub, Clover is much less fashion-conscious in her dialogue.
English Clover: Yeah, and risk unsightly facial bruises? I don't think so.
Mandarin Chinese Clover: Yeah, with the power of your own (Alex's) wristwatch, it's already just enough [to get us out].
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