Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids

A Space Whale Aesop-tastic kids' show, depicting the terrifying consequences of behaving badly. Originally a series of books by Jamie Rix.

Tropes used in Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids include:

• Advertising Only Continuity: One Grizzly Tale existed in a commercial, about someone who failed to watch the show and was struck with enough gas to make her float.
  • A 2010 bumper shows more of the HotHell Darkness, even showing that several of the adults and other beings on the show also ended up being prisoners along with the bad children (or as evidenced in one of the books, they work there).
• Aesop Collateral Damage: Often, if a parent is said to be responsible for the problem, they are only punished by the fate of their child. The best example of this is "Nobby's Nightmare".
• After the End: "Little Flower Girl".
• And I Must Scream: For example, in "The Crystal Eye", Fick is turned into a wraith after being trapped in the mirror (though he may have been one of the wraiths shot down in "eBoy", if that's any consolation) forever. The HotHell Darkness is another example.
  • "Sweets" and "Jack In A Box" also end this way, as does "Sick to Death".
• Animated Anthology
• Animorphism
• Ascended to Carnivorism: A cow in "The Grass Monkey" and a (giant) weevil in "Hear No Weevil, See No Weevil".
• Asshole Victim: Nearly every child on the show. There are, however, exceptions to both the "asshole" and "victim" parts.
• Big Bad: According to "Gruesome Grown-Ups", it appears the Night-Night Porter has many of the grown-ups and possibly other beings under his control. He uses them to collect bad children dead or alive, and even to turn good children bad.
• Big Brother Bully: Death by Chocolate, Monty's Python, The Worm and Cat's Eyes
• Big Creepy-Crawlies
• Brain In a Jar: "eBoy"
• The Butcher: "The Butcher Boy"
• Butt Monkey: Spindleshanks.
• Bloodless Carnage: Averted in some episodes such as "Bunny Boy", and especially "Sick to Death".
• Cain and Abel: "The Crystal Eye"
• Canon Foreigner: Later seasons use some storylines created for the TV show rather than taken from a book. On the other hand, several book stories were never adapted.
  • Uncle Grizzly and Spindleshanks also count.
• Canon Immigrant: The book series was revived in 2007 shortly after the show’s cancellation, starting with adapting several of the stories found in seasons 4, 5 and 6 to the printed page (albeit with a Darker and Edgier moodset to them), alongside a few new ones to spice things up. Eventually, the books became more and more focused on new stories until the final two, “The Gnaughty Gnomes of ‘No!” & “SuperZeroes”, which had only new ones, as they had run out of old episodes to adapt. These stories, alongside the Darker and Edgier atmosphere of the books, were adapted in Seasons 7 & 8, which also featured four all-new stories (attributed to "The Book of Grizzly Tales", which was never published but also existed as a Framing Device in the show), but still didn't bring over the remaining stories from the first four books (which had remained out of print).
• Children Are Innocent: In the case of the Chipper Chums (amongst others), innocence is NOT a good thing.
• Conspicuous CG: Seasons 5 and 6 used a strange mix of traditional animation and Flash.
• Cruella to Animals: An entire book, Nasty Little Beasts, is focused on this.
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: "eBoy" has overuse of the computer reduce the title character to a brain, eyes and hands. "Nerves of Steel" has Charlie Chicken gain literal nerves of steel through an unethical doctor, and is later magnetized.
• Darker and Edgier: The last two seasons had a grimmer atmosphere, a crueler host with a more grotesque appearance, and quite a bit more Heel Face Door Slams and surprising amounts of gore.
  • The HotHell Darkness also added a sense of hopelessness to the kids' efforts. Admittedly, this is also toned down in some areas from the books.
• Depraved Kids' Show Host: Uncle Grizzly. The Night-Night Porter manages to be even worse.
• Disproportionate Retribution
• Downer Ending: A few episodes end well for absolutely nobody involved, such as "The Hair Fairies" (The family loses their gift of perfect hair, Peacebiscuit is killed and the fairies are forced to leave their home) and "The Clothes Pigs" (the four piglets get to devour Truffle, but when they return home, they return to their status quo of being trampled by all the other pigs and unable to eat)
• Eaten Alive
• The End of the World as We Know It: "Tom Time" and "The Nuclear Wart".
• Epic Fail: In "Superstitious Nonsense", Aramita's attempt to avoid her own made-up superstitions, after forcing her parents to live in a car and denying them the ability to aid her, writing them off as strangers, has her run under a ladder, run past an ambulance, and spill salt. And then when she locks herself in a vault to avoid bad luck, a cow falls out of the sky on top of it and crushes her under the hard metal.
• Eye Scream
• Facial Horror
• The Fair Folk: "Tinklebell", "The Stick Men", "Goblin Mountain", "Simon Sulk", "The Hair Fairies"...
• Family-Unfriendly Death: Comes with the territory.
  • Cruel and Unusual Death: Some deaths that are pretty horrible by even the show's standards include "Sick to Death" (sucked into the vacuum cleaner piece by piece, with organs shown in surprising detail), "Death by Chocolate" (a chocolate fly lays an egg within Serena Slurp, causing her to transform into a chocolate fly and get splattered into chocolate by her sister), "The Lobster's Scream" (being boiled alive), "The Blood Doctor" (shriveling from vinegar in the veins), and "Tinklebell" (torn apart slowly with knives and forks that feed you to your own parents).
    • "The Rise And Fall of the Evil Guff" takes the cake, with Bart Thumper farting his way into a compost heap and then slowly decaying alive (he REALLY had this coming). "Hear No Weevil, See No Weevil" is almost as gruesome, with Broccoli Brassica having everything except her skin sucked out by a giant weevil. Bones, organs, muscles, blood...
• Fingore: "Little Fingers" and "The Pie Man". Inverted in "eBoy", where his fingers are one of the few parts remaining of him.
• Gaia's Lament: "Little Flower Girl" has Manchester in the future surrounded by desert.
• Gainax Ending: "The Bugaboo Bear" ends with the eponymous bear having delivered his victim as a toy to a new owner, before coming to a box of her dark secrets and opening it up to reveal... more toys.
  • "An Elephant Never Forgets" ends with the elephant being summoned by the severed foot to crush the children and leave only a pool of blood, with their ghosts scaring their parents out of the mansion, and then showing the elephant, translucent, now with all of its feet intact.
  • "The Lobster's Scream" ends with a dog peeing on a lobster statue for whatever reason.
• Gasshole: "The Rise and Fall of the Evil Guff"
• Gender Flip: In the book version of the story, B.S. Brogan was male.
• Green Aesop: "Burgerskip", "Recyclops", "The Watermelon Babies" and "Little Flower Girl".
• Gross-Out Show
• Heel Face Door Slam: In "The Crystal Eye", Fick, the evil twin, promises to share for his New Year's resolution... only to get upset over the garbage. This makes him run into his room, where he is taken back inside the mirror and then split in half. His good half gets to stay, while his evil half is taken into the mirror and begs to be released, promising that he will take on his New Year's resolution, but to no avail. He even finds his walkie-talkie, which turns out to have been destroyed. At the very end of the episode, one can see that the bad half has turned into a wraith, and is still inside the gypsy's mirror, as was implied to have happened to other bad children. We never see what happened to his original reflection (though it is shown one last time, changing into the appearance of a wraith, as the real Fick screams Oh NOOOOOOOO!, just before we see the gypsy leave).
  • Another example appears in "The Blood Doctor", where Georgina has her bad blood removed, but shrivels due to not being given good blood in time, and no effort is made to restore her. This is also heavily implied for every victim that survived in seasons 7 and 8, where regardless of their fate, they all get sent to the HotHell Darkness.
  • "The Flat-Pack Kid" may or may not be an example, for while Humpty Egg, the titular character, promises to not break anything again before being torn apart, but this may have just been an attempt to prevent the man from killing him.
  • "The Nuclear Wart" is an especially cruel example. Despite promising to be better brothers and help out, the world still ends, and by the time they get to the HotHell Darkness, they are right back to fighting, to the point their mugshot is torn. It also may justify some of the kids who didn't die still being sent there due to the world ending.
  • "Wolf Child" has a Double Subversion of this. While our protagonist decides to try and tell his parents about this problem, he starts turning into an actual baby... and then his father is too stupid to know the difference between someone acting babyish and an actual baby.
• Hell Hotel: The HotHell Darkness. It's underground, structured akin to a prison, and the keeper is willing to take even innocent children who stumble in without their consent.
• Hope Spot: In "Glued to the Telly", the child is struck with a disease that slowly turns him into a cheese and onion crisp. When he encounters a fat chef he likes and asks for help, it turns out he is hard of hearing and bakes him into a cheese and onion crisp directly.
• Horror Host: Both Uncle Grizzly and later the Night-Night Porter.
• Humiliation Conga: Many of the less-lethal episodes, such as "The Giant Who Grew Too Big For His Shoes", "The New Nanny" and "The Urban Fox"
• Infant Immortality: Completely and utterly averted.
• Ironic Hell: The outro to "Lazy Bones" has the Night-Night Porter send a razor-backed porcupine to accompany Ida, which pops her air-filled body.
• Karma Houdini: Those who enact the retribution seem to get off scot-free, even if they are normal adults. Another notable example is "The Bugaboo Bear", where the girl who mistreats the bear's victim gets off scot-free, along with the other children in "Message In A Bottle".
• Karmic Death
• Karmic Transformation
• Kids Are Cruel: Cruel enough to receive punishments as shown here.
• Kill'Em All: "The Dumb Klutzes" has the entire town eaten by a giant. To a lesser extent, "Simon Sulk" and "The Chipper Chums Go Scrumping" end with the death of every perpetrator.
• Large Ham: Uncle Grizzly, ready to make snarks and cackling laughter at any moment.
• Laser-Guided Karma
• Living Shadow: "The Spaghetti Man"
• Motor Mouth: Deconstructed in "The Apostrophic Expositor".
• New Media Are Evil: "eBoy" and "The Gas Man Cometh". To a lesser extent, "Glued to the Telly".
• Nice to the Waiter: Well, Oswald O'Burger at least wants his cattle to have pasture to roam on, rather than end up in a factory farm.
• Offing the Offspring: "Tinklebell".
• Reality Ensues: "The History Lesson". She simply fails the test and nothing else bad happens to her.
  • "Why Boys Make Better Burglars" ends with Billy simply being arrested (though in the book, he was sent to the HotHell Darkness).
• Reincarnation: "Cat's Eyes" ends with Cat Clore reincarnated as a crow. Crows are stated as the souls of the stupid.
  • Apparently, only Cat Clore's dead body ends up in the HotHell Darkness, and is used as a chandelier.
• Scare'Em Straight
• Self-Made Orphan: "The Rise and Fall of the Evil Guff" has Bart Thumper, who manages to kill his parents, and presumably his siblings.
• Something Completely Different: Several times:
  • "Burgerskip" has an adult as the subject of the story, running a fast-food brand.
  • "Prince Norman" has the main characters get a happy ending, while the villains get horribly mutilated.
  • "The Wooden Hill" has a happy ending, with the child overcoming his fear of the dark to climb the stairs.
  • The victims of "The Chipper Chums Go Scrumping" are largely innocent, with it coming off more as a straight horror story than a cautionary tale. The beginning is even a homage to the "Famous Five" novels.
• Space Whale Aesop
• Would Hurt a Child: The Night-Night Porter. He runs a hotel, which is more like a prison, that imprisons children, even innocent ones, within its depths. "Lazy Bones” even shows him dishing an ironic punishment to one prisoner there.