YMMV / Uncle Grandpa

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Invoked for Uncle Grandpa. Word of God says that the episodes are written so that "at the end, you don’t know if he's an idiot or a genius". Lampshaded in "Aunt Grandma" after Aunt Grandma reveals that her hatred of Uncle Grandpa stems from his getting too distracted by playing hacky-sack with Martians to help her win a science fair when she was a kid. He himself can't remember if he was trying to teach her how to have fun and not be so uptight or if he was just really obsessed with hacky-sack.
  • Is Beary Nice really oblivious to Hotdog Person's suffering, or is he a sadist who is intentionally putting Hotdog Person through torture and enjoying it? The bath episode in particular really points towards the latter.
• Awesome Art:
  • The animation is pretty fluid by Cartoon Network standards, but a notable example is this piece of promotional art for "Say Uncle". (The Steven Universe Crossover.)
  • The art style of the later seasons looks absolutely gorgeous.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • The main character himself to most in between fans and non fans of the character and the series itself, some find him funny and more of a Cloudcuckoolander, while his detractors despise him, mostly complained about his over-exaggerating man-child and crybaby personality and mostly for his Obfuscating Stupidity actions and rather choose others over him.
  • Pizza Steve started out as the fan favorite (to the point where he was more recognized than the title character of the show), but some fans are getting a bit tired of his over-inflated ego as of late.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: "Wasteland". The off-model animation and character expressions in that episode were bizarre even for this show.
• Bizarro Episode: Most episodes that Nick Edwards boarded tend to fall under this, even by the standards of this show. Especially "Wasteland", "Pal 2.0", "Wicked Shades", "A Gift for Gus", and "Uncle Cupid".
• Broken Base:
  • When Season 3 and onwards had debuted, the change of art style had a small amount of fans being critical about as they think that it made it less sticking with the cartoony aspect while most of the fanbase phrases it as an improvement over the previous two seasons.
  • And not only with Season 3 having to do with changing its art style, but mostly for the episode plots as it focused more on the characters and less on Uncle Grandpa helping children.
• Character Perception Evolution: When the show first came out, Pizza Steve was the fan favorite because people found his overinflated ego hilarious. As the series went on, however, he became more of a Base-Breaking Character because some fans started to be annoyed with his constant bragging. There are still several fans who still like him, though, especially since he's been shown to have his share of insecurities.
• Comedy Ghetto: The most widely accepted reason for the show's initial disdain. At the time Uncle Grandpa aired, cartoon series that leaned more towards story-driven dramedy, most notably Adventure Time, Gravity Falls, and Steven Universe, were becoming more common in an attempt to divert from the Animation Age Ghetto. So this show, with its episodic nature and sole emphasis on silly and wacky comedy, stood out like a sore thumb. However, the show's fans would argue that this was entirely the point.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Given her numerous attractive traits (curvaceous, British accent, athletic...) Aunt Grandma got herself a pair of these pretty quickly after her debut.
• Fandom Rivalry:
  • Grojband fans believe that this show is hogging all the airtime. On the USA Cartoon Network, the premieres replaced the timeslot The Looney Tunes Show used to premiere at (with the final episode premiering in 2014 on Boomerang), and Cartoon Planet on Fridays was replaced with a block hosted by Pizza Steve and Mr. Gus entitled "Pizza Night with Pizza Steve".
  • Fans of Steven Universe are rather broken on the crossover of this show and theirs. Some feel the two shows would mesh, others hate this show with a passion, and others who are fans of both shows embrace the possibility. Need it be said, fans of Uncle Grandpa who hate Steven Universe and vice versa, are not particularly excited.
  • One 2016 short called "The Grampies" depicts an award show in which Uncle Grandpa (the series) wins all of the awards. Fans of the other CN Original Series were livid that Uncle Grandpa was basically stroking its own ego and calling the other series inferior, as the short even featured the characters from the other shows (and reactions from Steven, Jake, Belson, and 2016 Buttercup, all voiced by their respective actors). Others simply got the joke and knew it was all in good fun, enjoying the surprising cameos from the likes of Billy, Johnny Bravo, and the casts of Steven Universe and Clarence. Some view it as poking fun at Nickelodeon for having SpongeBob SquarePants win the Kids' Choice Awards every single year, and years later someone used it to poke fun at the Game Awards 2020 giving The Last of Us Part II a similar treatment.
• Genius Bonus: The series finale "Exquisite Grandpa" may seem like even more of a Random Events Plot than usual for the show, but the title and the long list of storyboard artists for the episode shows that it's likely the result of a game of "exquisite corpse" between the artists.
• Growing the Beard: Many people claimed the series got better as it went on, especially when the show started changing its art style.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Uncle Grandpa saying that the other shows currently on CN aren't getting picked up for their next season during the end of "The Grampies" is this, since Uncle Grandpa itself got Screwed by the Network.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: A later-released adult animated film called Sausage Party, a movie about Anthropomorphic Food who believe that their human purchasers are "Gods" with little knowledge of their fate, features another talking slice of pizza, who berates the Stoner for having eaten his legs and family members while having to crawl inside his box.
• Ho Yay:
  • This exchange between Uncle Grandpa and Belly Bag, which is also a CMOF.
    Uncle Grandpa: That's a great idea, Belly Bag! I could just kiss you.
    Belly Bag: What's stopping ya?
    (Uncle G kisses him on the cheek.)
  • Pizza Steve has occasionally been referred to as a "Tasty Slice" by the other male characters. While it's just a reference that he's a sentient piece of food the delivery often sounds a little suggestive. There's also the fact that they would have had to taste him on some level to know he's tasty.
  • And then there’s one line in "Leg Wrestle", where Uncle Grandpa had said this when watching a high school teen sitcom show.
    Uncle Grandpa: Kevin is so hot.
• Jerkass Woobie: Pizza Steve's ego is difficult to like, but in "Bad Morning", there's the scene with the diving helmet, and in "Future Pizza", he worries so much about making Uncle Grandpa unhappy that his worrying is what ends up upsetting him. So, at the very least, he seems to be a tad conflicted.
• Memetic Badass: Uncle Grandpa himself has become one due to how a single episode of his show remained for several days after the mass removal of programs from HBO Max. This led to many jokes about how he's too powerful for WB to truly get rid of and portraying him as Cartoon Network's last hope in a similar vein to Kirby in the World of Light. This is helped by how he's canonically a Reality Warper and has apparently visited many different CN shows according to the Steven Universe Crossover "Say Uncle".
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Uncle Grandpa survived the purge. ^ExplanationIn August 2022, various shows were removed from HBO Max, including Uncle Grandpa. However, a single episode of UG, fittingly titled "Fleas Help Me", was left watchable by accident. After this was discovered, cartoon fans started making jokes about the cast of Uncle Grandpa being the sole survivors of some kind of a cataclysmic event.
  • Uncle Grandpa sucks.^ExplanationA meme-y exchange between Mr. Gus and the Invincible (2021) character Omniman starting from him saying said line (which made Mr. Gus effortlessly destroy him) gained some notoriety and re-animations as the show was coming back into prominence.
• Memetic Molester: It's not exactly difficult to frame Uncle Grandpa — an older man dressed in rainbow-colored suspenders, short-shorts and a propeller hat with a prominent mustache who just suddenly appears in the company of underaged kids where he can whisk them away to a magical place away from their parents and guardians — as some type of creep.
• More Popular Spin Off: To Secret Mountain Fort Awesome.
• Nightmare Retardant: The noise from "Mystery Noise" ...which sounds less terrifying and more like Donald Duck sticking his fingers into an electrical socket the more you hear it. Which is a lot.
• Spiritual Successor: To The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy in terms of No Fourth Wall and frequent references to other Cartoon Network shows. They even shared the same joke of the show's writing staff being literal babies and monkeys.
• Strawman Has a Point:
  • Aunt Grandma, aka Priscilla Jones, has hated Uncle Grandpa since she was younger for taking her on a trip, while her science project got damaged, along with the length of the trip leaving her with no time to repair the damage herself, resulting in second place. While it may be Disproportionate Retribution, she is right to point out how Uncle Grandpa is obsessed with bringing kids along on unnecessary adventures instead of dealing with their problems and being too simple-minded to care for them. However, the problem is that invalidates her point; Uncle Grandpa arrived to not help her with her project but to help her in needing to relax and have fun once in a while, especially since that 2nd place isn't that bad. If Uncle Grandpa does his routine in a way that helps a person's character with a once-in-a-lifetime experience, then Priscilla's experience was necessary.
  • Cheesepuff Mike's main complaint about Uncle Grandpa's "Walking On Hot Dogs" video was how stupid it was.
• Take That, Scrappy!: One thing that's fondly remembered about the crossover with Steven Universe is Amethyst eating Pizza Steve.
• Vindicated by History: Around the show's arrival in later 2013, everyone more or less passed Uncle Grandpa off as yet another stupid show of the late 00's - early 10's. As the show went on, and especially after it ended, its reputation has softened considerably, with its animation style and humor being seen as unique instead of awful, with positive comparisons to The Golden Age of Animation. It helps that creator Pete Browngardt went on to produce Looney Tunes Cartoons, which brings Looney Tunes back to its original Golden Age glory.

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