Spoilsbury Toast Boy

Toast Boy, our frightened hero.

Good beetles, we are.

Spoilsbury Toast Boy is a series of three short flash animations created in 2004 and 2005 by David Firth, the same man who brought us the Mind Screw known as Salad Fingers.

So one can guess what is to be expected from this creation of his.

The series is set in an unidentified (but rather empty) world run mostly by beetles of either normal or human proportions. Toast Boy, the nervous eponymous character, lives with his grandmother and works in a sweat-shop type toast factory with his sister, Liache. One night, the beetles decide that "pleasant thoughts are unhealthy", and burrow into Toast Boy's head through his ear. Then the nightmares and hallucinations begin...

One of David Firth's lesser known works, the series is told from end to beginning as followed: Spoilsbury Toast Boy, Spoilsbury Toast Boy -1, and Spoilsbury Toast Boy -2.

Tropes used in Spoilsbury Toast Boy include:

• Back to Front
• Bad Dreams.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: The beetles come in two sizes: an inch or two, and as big as a human being. One beetle is about as large as a house.
• Blatant Lies: A good portion of what the beetles say.

The beetles: Beetles know this. Beetles are good doctors.

• Body Horror
• Clip Art Animation: Some of the smaller beetles are clip art pictures.
• Compelling Voice: During the hallucinations, the beetles will often tell Toast Boy what he should do. Another more forceful one comes from a large speaker that will appear out of nowhere and tell the slave children what to do.

Hallucination beetle: (to Toast Boy) I think you should kill her... slit her open and burn her nipples...

• Crapsack World: It's David Firth, what do you expect?
• Creepy Child: Toast Boy. Liache also might count.
• Dead Little Sister: Liache is eventually drowned by the beetles, on the request of her mucus.
• Deranged Animation
• Disappeared Dad: One oddly pleasant dream reveals someone who might be Toast Boy's and Liache's father. It's never explained what happened to him.
• Downer Ending: Kill'Em All, and The Bad Guy Wins.
  • Given the similar character design of the creepy obsessive boy in Salad Fingers 4, and the scarring on his head, one could say that the machine worked... more or less...
• Fat Bastard: The beetle the children are forced to make toast for.
• Foregone Conclusion: At the end of the first short, Toast Boy is stabbed to death by the beetles' "Brain Fixing Machine".
• Freak-Out
• Gross Up Close-Up: Mostly of the grandma.
• Grotesque Gallery
• Half-Dressed Cartoon Animal: Though not cartoonish in the slightest, most of the human-sized beetles wear only hats, vests, and jackets.

Beetle #2: Oh we're such jokers. Beetle #1: Jokers in trousers. Beetle #2: Well, we're not wearing shorts! Beetle #1: It's not really the weather for it.

• Ill Girl: Liache, though the most she has is a stuffy nose.
• Kill It with Fire: Toast Boy's grandma is found dead, tipped over into the fireplace by a beetle.
• Mad Eye: Toast Boy and Liache.
• Mind Rape: The beetles seem to enjoy inflicting this on poor Toast Boy.
  • Also literal Mind Rape... and yes, it is as horrific as it sounds.
• Mind Screw: All of it.
• Morally-Ambiguous Doctorate

Doctor Jill: (To Liache) Do you find the mucus in your nasal passage makes breathing a chore? (Liache nods) Well then, perhaps you don't deserve to breathe at all.

• Nightmare Sequence: Several.
• Orifice Evacuation: Even though the beetles crawl through his ear, Toast Boy spits a few out of his mouth.
• Orifice Invasion: The smaller beetles enter Toast Boy's body through his ear. And enter his grandma through her vagina.
• Peek-a-Boo Corpse: Toast Boy stumbles upon his grandma's burning corpse in the second short.
• Sanity Slippage: Often, for both Toast Boy and possibly the viewer.
• Scare Chord: Whenever Toast Boy enters a Freak-Out, and when he finds his dead grandma in the fireplace.
• Surreal Horror
• Talking Animal: All of the beetles talk, regardless of size.
• The Swarm: The smaller beetles.
• Three Shorts
• Troubled Fetal Position: Toast Boy is often seen in one, especially during the first short.
• The Unintelligible: Most of the voices are garbled but relatively understandable. Toast Boy, on the other hand, speaks in nothing but odd tones that require subtitles to be understood.
• What Do You Mean It Wasn't Made on Drugs?
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: The doctor beetle gives Liache this lecture when she complains about her stuffy nose:

Doctor Jill: Mucus is a living thing you know. It has a certain degree of intelligence.