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Soy un gnomo (I am a gnome) |
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In every wish and dream and happy home, |
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The World of David the Gnome was a Spanish animated television series made by BRB Internacional, based on the children's books The Gnomes and The Secret Book of Gnomes, by the Dutch author Wil Huygen and illustrator Rien Poortvliet. The series followed the adventures of one David the Gnome, a doctor who in most episodes traveled through the forest on his pet fox Swift and rescued animals that were injured or in danger.
The English dub, made in Montreal by CINAR (and featuring Tom Bosley as the voice of David), aired on Nickelodeon in the late 80s and early 90s, and in Canada on Family Channel. The French dub also aired on Radio-Canada.
There's also a spinoff, Wisdom of the Gnomes (in Spanish La llamada de los gnomos or "Call of the Gnomes"), based on the same source material and featuring a gnome judge named Klaus who travels the forest solving disputes between animal plaintiffs and defendants. This series was also dubbed into English, although with a different, Los Angeles-based voice cast.
- All Trolls Are Different: Clumsy? Check. Evil race? Check. Turn to stone in sunlight? ... Check.
- Anti-Sneeze Finger: Might be or not a Running Gag in this show...
- Automaton Fox: Swift, to the extreme.
- Battle Couple: David and Lisa in "The Shadowless Stone."
- Bittersweet Ending: In the last episode, David and his wife Lisa die of old age. Traumatized and lonely, Swift moves on to make new friends with a glasses-wearing David look-a-like named Christopher and his vixen.
- Cheerful Child: David's granddaughter Susan, who appears in a number of episodes and is very close to her grandfather.
- Which causes a tiny bit of Fridge Logic if thought about too much — since, as noted below, gnomes are always twins, why didn't the audience ever see Susan's twin? David and Lisa never even mention any other grandchildren.
- Combat Medic: David was a doctor by trade, but it didn't stop him from battling the trolls.
- Creator Cameo: Wil Huygen himself appears in an episode of Wisdom of the Gnomes, in which Klaus and Danny call him out for some "inaccuracies" in his book, though it's not stated specifically what those inaccuracies are.
- Every Episode Ending
- Friend to All Living Things: The gnomes as a whole, David perhaps in particular.
- Green Aesop
- Happily Married: David and Lisa
- Hey, It's That Voice!: David is Howard Cunningham in the English version. Other voices will be familiar to anyone who's seen other Montreal-dubbed animation - i.e. Lisa was Mommy Koala and Susan was Mimi Rabbit in another CINAR dubbed animation, Adventures of the Little Koala.
- Humans Are Bastards: Gnomes do have a few human friends and allies but generally view them as this trope.
- James Bondage: David and Swift get imprisoned by the trolls in the second episode, requiring Lisa to find and rescue them.
- Keep Circulating the Tapes
- Literary Agent Hypothesis
- Mouse World
- Nice Hat: And they almost never take them off, not even for baths.
- They remove their hat so rarely that in the second episode one of the trolls even carries David by holding the tip of his hat.
- No Fourth Wall: David and his wife frequently address the audience directly, 'educating' them about the gnomish lifestyle.
- Non-Human Sidekick: Swift the fox.
- Older Than They Look: Gnomes live to be exactly 400 years old.
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Susan: Grandma, I'm not a child anymore! I'm 65 years old! |
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- Our Gnomes Are Weirder: Not necessarily mad but definitely non-blue smurfs with some stripes of Underground Monkey, Can't Argue with Elves, and Speaks Fluent Animal. Also Mind Manipulation, Telepathy, and Horse of a Different Color.
- The Power of Love: Required to open the Cool Gate in "The Shadowless Stone."
- Scenery Porn: Lavishly animated for the time.
- The Renaissance Age of Animation
- Translation Convention: It's mentioned several times that gnomes speak their own language, and humans are forbidden from knowing it, except one word...
- Unto Us a Son and Daughter Are Born: "Gnomes only have children once in our lives, and they're always twins," albeit not always a boy and a girl.
Slitzweitz!