That's So Raven

I'm psychic and I didn't see this coming. —Raven Baxter

That's So Raven was a Disney Channel show that ran from 2003 to 2007, aimed at the tween audience. The plot revolves around precognitive teenager Raven Baxter as she gets herself, her friends Eddie and Chelsea and her family out of various situations, usually by using her Psychic Powers and skills as a "Master of Disguise", neither of which help. It was the chronologically first series in the DCLAU.

It became the first Disney show to buck the 65 episode trend, the first to run four seasons, and the first to reach 100 episodes.

---

The show contains examples of:

• Air Vent Passageway: Raven enters an air vent in "Clothes Minded" to find some cheese.
• All Just a Dream: "Soup to Nuts".
  • The Halloween episode turns out to be one of Raven's visions. She quickly corrects the error.
• All Women Love Shoes
• Alpha Bitch: Alana; Bianca; alternately, Nikki. Also, Jasmine in the Musical Episode, and in Season 4, both Tiffany and Muffy were this.
• Annoying Younger Sibling: Cory.
• Aside Glance: Raven does this after she and Chelsea dismiss the idea of a TV show about psychic teenager. See Who Would Want to Watch Us? below.
• Backdoor Pilot: There's an episode where Corey goes to Hollywood but it mainly focuses on actress Ally Parker. It was supposed to set up a show called Better Dayz, that was later scrapped and Retool-ed into Hannah Montana
• Black Best Friend: Inverted. Cory and Raven both have Token White best friends.
• Boy Band: The Boys in Motion.
• Butt Biter: Donna Cabonna's dog gets poor Raven this way twice in one scene. Ouch!
• Childhood Memory Demolition Team: The plot of the episode "On Top of Old Oaky".
• Christmas Episode: "Escape Claus".
• Clip Show: In the last episode of Season 3 "Vision Impossible", the gang looks at Raven's memories on a large TV screen.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Chelsea.
• Crossover: That's So Suite Life of Hannah Montana.
• Cue the Rain: Turned up an extra notch. Raven got stuck in a limo's moon roof when going to prom. Then it started raining on her. "Well at least It Can't Get Any Worse"...cue the gale force winds.
• Cymbal-Banging Monkey: Cory steals one. It haunts his dreams.
• A Day in the Limelight: There is an episode where Cory goes to Hollywood and meets a child actress who wants a normal life. The episode mostly focuses on her. It was a Backdoor Pilot for a show that never got picked up. However because the actress is played by Alyson Stoner the fans didn't seem to mind.
• Deus Angst Machina: All of Raven's visions have to be misleading and end up getting her in trouble. Some of them don't even come true at all.
• The Ditz: Chelsea and Sierra.
• DIY Disaster: In one episode, a very prominent business man is to visit Victor's restaurant. Victor creates a Foreman grill-type device that both "grills and chills". He demonstrated his creation by having it grill a steak and chill some jumbo shrimp. However, he crossed a few wires and instead, the grill flash freezes the steak, and the chiller turns the shrimp into charred lump with tails.
• Dojikko: Chelsea.
• Extranormal Institute: The Psychic Institute in "Saving Psychic Raven".
• Fable Remake: The Wizard of Oz in "Soup to Nuts".
• Fantastic Racism: The teens at the Psychic Institute look down on "normies".
  • Raven is afraid of becoming a victim of Fantastic Racism herself if her secret ever gets out.
• Fat Best Friend: Eddie.
• Five-Finger Discount: Episode about Cory of the same name. See Very Special Episode.
• Fully-Absorbed Finale: The Suite Life of Zack and Cody episode "That's So Suite Life of Hannah Montana" takes place sometime after "Checkin' Out", the canon last episode of That's So Raven, in which Raven plays a large part. She has a vision of Cody getting into trouble at Carey's party, which is the driving force behind the main plot, and is pivotal to the subplot, where, with Maddie's help, she ends up selling her dresses to London Tipton and Hannah Montana.
• Fundraiser Carnival
• Girl Posse: Nicki's hairspray girls, Alana's (and then Bianca's) posse.
• Grand Finale: Surprisingly, for a show as popular as it was, That's So Raven didn't have a series finale. A possible reason for this could be that The Movie would have concluded the series. However, as it was cancelled, the series was Left Hanging. Thankfully, Raven's Home (which takes place 15-20 years later) picks up where the show left off.
• Granola Girl: Again, Chelsea.
• Ha Ha Ha No: Raven did this to Chelsea a couple of times.
• Hollywood Pudgy: Invoked in an episode where Raven is told she isn't skinny enough to model the clothes she designed for a fashion show. She and the twig-thing model then team up and both wear the outfit on the runway. Also deconstructed when both of them chew out the magazine owner that's sponsoring the show, saying that no one is as skinny as they look on the magazine.
• Human Ladder: Raven, Alana, and Loca perform one in "Clothes Minded", so Alana can put cheese in the air vent.
• I Just Want to Be Normal
• Large Ham: Raven, Raven, Raven, and - oh, RAVEN.
• Magic Meteor: Eddie gets powers for one episode by a meteor passing that only happens once in a while.
• Meaningful Name: The raven was the sacred bird of Apollo, the Greek god of prophecy.
• Musical Episode: "The Road To Audition".
• Out of Order
• Paper-Thin Disguise: She would constantly disguise herself, including sometimes as old men, despite, looking nothing like a man, and sounding exactly like a teenage girl, speaking in a false deep voice.
• Party Scheduling Gambit
• Prophecy Twist: Once an Episode.
• Put on a Bus: Tanya, the mother who was one of the important supporting characters, suddenly without warning apparently went to England to become a lawyer. She's never seen or heard from again. This was due to the actor who played her not seeing eye to eye with the director and writing staff and left after the third season.
• The Rashomon: The episode "The Lying Game", where Raven and Cory tell their versions on what happened when Raven went to Cory's class for Job Shadow Day.
• Real Life Writes the Plot: Alana, who was played by 3LW and The Cheetah Girls' Adrienne Bailon, took a Long Bus Trip when she was "so bad she went to military school." In real life, Bailon and Raven-Symone had internal disputes while they were in The Cheetah Girls, which caused Bailon to refuse to reprise her role and Raven to leave The Cheetah Girls.
• Recycled Set: The hallway/locker area set on Saved by the Bell never got destroyed, and has been reused in many high-school based shows. It is currently being used as the school set for ICarly after That's So Raven used it before.
• Secret Keepers: Raven's family plus Eddie and Chelsea.
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Most of them. Usually when Raven tries to prevent a certain vision from coming true, she makes it happen instead.
• Slapstick Knows No Gender: The main character, Raven, gets involved in a lot of slapstick, usually on the receiving end.
• Spider Sense
• Spin-Off: Cory in The House.
  • There was also supposed to be a spinoff called Better Dayz starring Alyson Stoner. The show would later be developed into Hannah Montana.
• Standardized Sitcom Housing: The interior sets of the Baxter pad are remarkable similar to that of the Winslows of Family Matters and the Tanners of Full House.
• Stand-In Parents: Raven posed as her own mother at a parent-teacher conference to prevent her mother from finding out how bad her grades were. When the mother (ineviatably) found out, she was both angry that Raven had lied to her and offended because of the insulting fat suit Raven had used for the disguise.
• Suck E. Cheese's
• Talking to Herself: In the episode "Coountry Cousins", Raven plays several characters, Nutty Professor style. However, Man of a Thousand Voices she is not.
• Test Kiss: Raven and Eddie share one in the last episode. The results were ambiguous...
• Three Amigos: Raven, Eddie, and Chelsea.
• Title Theme Tune
• Token White: Chelsea.
• Totem Pole Trench: Stanley and Eddie sneak into a party Raven is throwing by doing this.
• Trope Codifier: Everything the Disney Channel doesn't owe to Lizzie McGuire, it owes to That's So Raven. The Laugh Track, the constant yelling, the reliance on hackneyed plots, all come from here. It was also the first show to break the infamous "65 Episode Policy", running to a full 100, paving the way for future shows to also break 65 (including the Un Cancelled Kim Possible).
• Two Girls and a Guy: With only a Eddie/Raven Ship Tease and no drama.
• Two-Teacher School: Senorita Rodriguez and Mr. Lawler.
  • There were other teachers as well as another principal at the school but they were put on Long Bus Trips.
• Unexpected Positive: Raven and Corey go to the dentist. Corey's scared, so (after having a vision in which one of the pair is shown to need a filling) Raven gets in the chair to show him that it's not so bad. Guess who needs the filling?
• Unlimited Wardrobe: Raven is a fashion designer.
• Verbal Tic: Principal Lawler has a propensity to expectorate when he speaks.
  • This leads to a Crowning Moment of Funny because when he spoke into a microphone, the saliva he spat shorted it out.
• Very Special Episode: Oh so many. Let's just say that this show wasn't very subtle. For example....
  • Dealing with a racist store manager who refused to employ black people.
  • There was also one about too much fast food making people fat.
  • There was even another one about shoplifting.
  • And one about body image.
  • And one about wearing real fur.
  • The second to last episode was one about smoking.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Usually, the A and B plots were kept mostly separate. However, in one memorable instance, the B plot had Cory addicted to online video games, heading very obviously toward a formulaic "everything-in-moderation" Aesop. Halfway through the episode, a goat from Raven's story chews through the wire of Cory's joystick, and we never hear anything about Cory's subplot ever again.
• Whole-Plot Reference: See Fable Remake above.
• Who Would Want to Watch Us?: In "He's Got the Power".