Argosy Avenue/Tropes


 * Animated Actors: One of the hallmarks of the series is that this is the characters' job.
 * The Random Cowboy is a Western character who got lost and ended up in a cartoon.
 * The Gussy and Fiona cartoons make use of this. Gussy eventually resorts to telling Fiona what she’s supposed to do, which Fiona refuses.
 * Art-Style Clash: Due to "Aldo Boomer" being several people, each with their own way of designing characters, this is common.
 * Depending on the Artist/Unreliable Illustrator: Exaggerated; no two shots are the same in this series.
 * Everything Trying to Kill You: The Dawson siblings (and other human characters) only survive the slapstick of the Funny Animals by sheer luck.
 * Free-Range Children: The Dawsons' parents are never shown.
 * Genre Savvy: How Fiona outsmarts Gussy in every cartoon they’re teamed up in.
 * He Also Did: One of the original Aldo Boomers, Michael Shires, also created the Gum Girl comics, and went on to become the head of Argosy's television animation unit.
 * House Pseudonym: Rare film example. "Aldo Boomer" was a shared credit for several creators, most famously Michael Shires, Jakob Svenson, Ann White, and David Doring. They still credit "Boomer" in new shorts even today, even considering that if Boomer was real, he'd probably be over 100 years old.
 * Identical Stranger: In several cartoons, Gandy goes to another country/continent/planet/region to escape Gussy Goat… only to be met by an “ethnic” version of Gussy.
 * Immune to Slapstick: The non-antagonistic human characters (such as the Dawsons) are immune to slapstick.
 * Improbable Weapon User: The Funny Animal characters can use anything as a weapon.
 * Inexplicably Identical Individuals: One of the main gags associated with this series. Several cartoons have Gussy facing off against hordes of Gandy Geese. However, this only seems to apply to the Funny Animal characters.
 * Intelligible Unintelligible: The Dawsons can somehow understand Noit's "NOIT NOIT NOIT".
 * Killer Rabbit: Noit the Evil Spaceman may look like a cute little astronaut, but he's actually an alien invader hellbent on destruction.
 * Loads and Loads of Characters: There are a LOT of characters. The Wikipedia page only mentions 3 characters, followed by the vague phrase "and several other cartoon characters". That's how many characters we're talking about. There's the ones absolutely everyone knows (Gussy Goat, Ginny Goat, Rocky Raccoon, Rinna Raccoon, Catnip Cat, Fiona Cat, Zara and Erika Dawson, David Duck, Gandy Goose, Buzzy the Crow), and the ones almost everyone knows (Trina Mouse, Sadie Skunk, Zach and Annabelle Dawson, Quackula, the Random Cowboy, Noit the Evil Spaceman, Deputy Dawg, Marvelous Molly and her friends Lexi and Olivia, Stephanie Gavin, E.O. Kango, Ren Tiger). This sheer number of characters is mainly due to the fact that Argosy had a sheer number of staff: "Aldo Boomer" was a pseudonym for hundreds of contracted animators hired by Argosy (Argosy did the same trick with "Erin Hunter" when they got into the YA novel business with an adaptation of their Warrior Cats toyline). This is even more remarkable when you remember that the only local competition to Argosy in the cartoon business in the old days (besides Johnson) was the AoFM, which relied exclusively on two characters.
 * Long Runner: The series has been running, non-stop, since 1930. That's more than 90 years.
 * Pokémon Speak: Noit the Evil Spaceman can only say "NOIT!"
 * Rules Lawyer: When teamed up with Fiona, Gussy becomes this. ”You’re supposed to ask what TNT stands for.”
 * Shifted to CGI: Averted. Robert Stainton, creator of Rotanimation, was asked by an Argosy executive in 1992 if it could be used for the Argosy Avenue series; he rebutted them by saying that Rotan was a televisual animation system, not suited for theatrical shorts. Since then, Argosy has kept a traditional animation studio alive just to crank out shorts.
 * Shout Out: GoAnimate's "Comedy World" theme uses a vaguely-similar style to some of the human characters in Argosy Avenue, to the point where Argosy's parent company MediaCorp considered suing Alvin Hung for copyright infringement, until being told that Comedy World was actually influenced by Family Guy.
 * The Smurfette Principle: Inverted: there are just as many female characters as there are male characters, and they're equally iconic. It helped that several of the Aldos (most notably Ann White), as well as a lot of Argosy executives (such as Carmen Dile back when the series was new), are female.
 * Slice of Life: Most of Catnip and Fiona’s solo cartoons are like this: the difference is that Catnip’s cartoons are Denser and Wackier, while Fiona’s cartoons are Lighter and Softer. Both still have a lot of slapstick, though.
 * The non-antagonist human characters (the Dawsons, Marvelous Molly and her friends, Stephanie Gavin) also mostly appear in slice-of-life outings.
 * Synchro-Vox: The Random Cowboy was meant to be "a Western character in the wrong movie", so he has a more realistic design than the other characters, including Synchro-Voxed lips.
 * Token Human: The Dawsons (and the other characters created by David Doring) are these in the protagonists (there are several human antagonists).
 * Too Dumb to Live: One of the Trope Makers was Gandy Goose, who is constantly falling for all of Gussy Goat’s traps, even the bleedingly-obvious ones. As shown in many cartoons, Gussy could place a bear trap, with a giant sign saying “WARNING: BEAR TRAP!”, and Gandy would still get caught in it. Even in his solo cartoons, Gandy is Too Dumb to Live: he tries to get rid of a rat infestation in his house, by eating rat poison.
 * Universal-Adaptor Cast: One of the Trope Makers; the Avenue Gang can be anywhere, at any time.
 * Voice Changeling: In the Gussy/Fiona cartoons, Gussy is annoyed at Fiona going “off-script”, and tells her in a normal-sounding, unaccented voice what he excepts her to do. This is a stark contrast with his normal Irish-accented voice.
 * Wrong Genre Savvy: Gussy acts like everyone else is just as dumb as Gandy Goose, when Buzzy outsmarts him often, Catnip just ignores the elaborate traps and moves on, and Fiona is Genre Savvy herself.
 * The Random Cowboy is written as a Western character who took a wrong turn and ended up in Argosy Avenue.