The Fixies - TV Tropes

And if you meet a Fixie please don't let their secret out!^note 

The Fixies (Russian: “Фиксики”) is a CGI childrens’ show produced by Aeroplane Film Company and animated by Petersburg Animation Studio. It is a very loose adaptation of the childrens’ book Warranty Men, written by Edward Upensky.

Premiering in 2010, the show follows the adventures of Nolik and his older sister Simka, two young Fixies- with Fixies being tiny beings that maintain electrical and mechanical devices, and hide their existence from humans by transforming into screws whenever people are around- and their friend Tom Thomas, the (allegedly) only human boy to ever meet and befriend Fixies.

Together, Tom, Nolik, and Simka get into various comedic scrapes- each one leading to the Fixies repairing a device while explaining to the audience how it works.

In 2012, a second season was produced, which introduced several other Fixies- whip-smart Digit, kindhearted Toola, rebellious Fire, vain Verta, and their teacher Grandpus- and the concept of “Fixie school”, located inside the laboratory of Professor Eugenius- who is also aware of the Fixies’ secret.

In 2015, a third season came out, although it brought no major changes; midway through the third season, the show’s first movie, entitled The Fixies: Top Secret, came out.

A second movie, Fixies Vs Crabots, came out in December of 2019, just after the third season’s end.

A fourth season kicked off in 2020, with the subtitle “Newcomers”; Katya, Tom Thomas’s usually-unseen crush, who had finally made her screen debut in Top Secret, is now a major character, with her apartment being home to the twin fixies Tweak and Geek, and their (adoptive) grandmother Basiya.

The fifth season, subtitled “High Five!”, began airing in 2022; it begins with Professor Eugenius opening a new science museum which becomes a recurring location, and brings back Mega from Fixies Vs Crabots as a series regular. It also introduces a new human character- Slavik, the grandson of the museum’s security guard and a boy with a knack for obviously causing problems for the Fixies.

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The Fixies provides examples of:

• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: In “The Program”, Dr. Eugenius tries to give the manipulator (a giant robotic arm) the ability to respond to voice commands, only for it to start going haywire and trashing the lab.
• Alien Episode:
  • “The Antenna” has Eugenius setting up a radio telescope in hopes of detecting signals from aliens… only for Digit and Toola to get trapped up there, and their attempts to call for help to be mistaken for messages from the cosmos.
  • “Mars Rover” has the Fixies pretending to be aliens for a movie… and ending up having to keep the ruse up to prevent Slavik from finding out their secret.
• Always Identical Twins: The only twins seen so far in the show are the identical Tweak and Geek.
• Amateur Film-Making Plot:
  • In “The Movie”, Nolik tries to film the other Fixies playing basketball.
  • In “Mars Rover”, the Fixies use the camera of a model Mars rover to film a movie about Martians (played by them in costumes).
• Animated Adaptation: It’s based on a book from the 1970s called Warranty Men.
• Animated Outtakes: The end credits of episodes from later seasons have these.
• April Fools' Plot: “The Hiccups” takes place on April Fools’ Day, with Tom Thomas scaring Katya and inadvertently causing her to come down with a case of the hiccups.
• Art Shift: The body of the show is done in CGI, but short 2D-animated scenes occur, usually to depict information about an invention or go along with a song sequence.
• Automatic Door Malfunction: “The Motion Sensor” has the motion sensor Eugenius installed on his warehouse door malfunctioning and activating for no reason; at the end of the episode, the reverse happens, with Eugenius walking straight into the door, which didn’t open due to the Fixies having disabled the motion sensor earlier.
• Birthday Episode: Tom Thomas has had two (“The Robot” and “The Notes”), his mother’s had one (“The Pencil”), and Nolik had one as well (simply called “The Birthday”).
• Broken Treasure: In “The Robot”, Tom Thomas’s father accidentally breaks a toy robot he was going to give Tom for his birthday the following day; he promises Tom’s mother that he’ll fix it before the morning, but can’t manage to do so. Of course, the fixies repair it during the night, leaving Tom’s father baffled as to how it fixed itself.
• Chained Heat: The episode “Glue” has a stray blob of glue sticking Nolik and Fire’s hands together, leaving them stuck with each other.
• Christmas Episode: There’s one of these pretty much once a season- (“The String Lights”, “The Kaleidoscope”, “The Sleigh”, “Snow”, and “Christmas Tree”), as well as the special episodes “Time Travel” and “The Marshmallow”.
• Color-Coded Characters: The characters were made with this in mind, although it starts breaking down a bit once the expanding cast necessitated having multiple Fixies of the same color.
  • Nolik - Light Blue
  • Simka - Light Orange
  • Papus - Green
  • Masia - Pink
  • Shypula / Toola - Yellow
  • Ygrek / Digit - Purple
  • Fire - Red
  • Verta - Green
• Company Cross-References: Multiple episodes contain references to KikoRiki, another Petersburg Animation Studio cartoon. One instance is in "The Cartoon", where Simka shows that series to Tom Thomas.
• Creating Life Is Unforeseen: Fixies are a species-wide case of this; in the show’s world, the idea that craftsmen put a little piece of themselves into everything they make is more than a metaphor, and those little pieces became the first Fixies.
• Crying Wolf: In “The Fire Extinguisher” Fire shouting his own name for fun leads to the other Fixies not believing him when a real fire starts up in the laboratory.
• Cue the Rain: This is brought up in “The Umbrella”, with Toola being convinced that it’s going to rain because Tom Thomas’s parents washed their car; at the end of the episode, Toola also spots several more “signs” that it’s going to rain. Grandpus points out that all of the signs are indoors, and it couldn’t possibly rain there… before a mechanical fault sets off the laboratory’s sprinklers.
• Diegetic Soundtrack Usage: At the end of “Musical Notes”, Tom and the Fixies play a rendition of the theme tune.
• Disease-Prevention Aesop: The episode “Germs” has a lesson on how it’s important to wash your hands to clean off germs, aided by a look through a microscope.
• A Dog Named "Cat": Bug the spider is a variation. Spiders aren't bugs; they're arachnids.
• Dream Episode: “The Magic Wand” has Tom Thomas dreaming about having a magic wand that allows him to, among other things, cancel school forever, duplicate Chewsocka, and enlarge the Fixies to human size.
• Edutainment Show: The show teaches kids about the inner workings of everyday machines.
• "Everybody Laughs" Ending: These can be found in a decent amount of episodes- take “The Antenna”, where, after Eugenius’s attempt to find intelligent life in space fails, Simka remarks that he found some unintelligent life (Digit and Toola, who got trapped in his radio telescope), at least.
• Everything Is an Instrument:
  • In “The Drum”, Nolik decides he wants to be a drummer, and tries to practice by hitting a cog with his hands; he even gets a full song where he drums on various things.
  • “Musical Notes” has the Fixies performing a song by hitting glasses filled with different levels of water with sticks.
• Expository Theme Tune: The opening theme details how the Fixies repair machines without humans knowing; the second season even adds another verse talking about young Fixies going to school.
• Fictional Video Game: “The Fan” has Tom Thomas playing an old-school racing game on his computer; the game has a top-down perspective, and playing involves moving left and right to maneuver around other cars.
• Green Aesop: A few episodes have one -“The Paper”, “Plastic”, and “Saving Energy”, to be precise.
• Helium Speech: Tom Thomas indulges in some of this (using helium from a balloon he’d just gotten down from the ceiling) in “The Hair Dryer”.
• Hiccup Hijinks: The plot of “The Hiccups”; by the end of the episode, Katya’s cured, but Tom Thomas now has them.
• Hollywood Chameleons: In “The Disguise”, Tom Thomas has to pet-sit Katya’s chameleon, which is one of these; in short order, it escapes, and its camouflage ability causes a lot of trouble when the Fixies try to recapture it.
• Hover Board: The Fixies have floating “Fixieboards”, which are handy for getting around in to-them-gigantic environments.
• House Fey: The Fixies are a modern take on this concept; they live in human homes and fix things when people aren’t looking; unlike most examples, they don’t expect anything in return, and are content as long as people aren’t trying to “investigate” or capture them.
• Human Chess: In “The Chess”, Nolik ends up having to stand in for a missing pawn in Eugenius and Grandpus’s game of chess; Hilarity Ensues when he’s not very good at following the rules.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Most episodes are named very simply, with the title merely being the object or concept that serves as the episode’s educational focus; the English dub usually keeps these titles but tacks a “the” on front.
• Informed Species: Bug is, allegedly, a spider, despite looking absolutely nothing like one- she has two human-like eyes, five legs, and is blue for some reason.
• In Name Only: Just about the only connection the show has with Warranty Men is the general concept of little people living in appliances and fixing them.
• Interspecies Friendship: Nolik and Simka are friends with the human Tom Thomas, despite the fact that humans aren’t supposed to know that Fixies exist. Dedus / Grandpus has a similar friendship going on with Professor Eugenius.
• Last Place You Look: One scene in “The Reflexes”, has Eugenius looking for his glasses- which turn out to be on his forehead.
• Loose Tooth Episode: “The Tooth”; Katya loses her tooth, and Hilarity Ensues when both Basiya and her mother try to sneak into her room late at night and swap the tooth for a gift.
• Jaw Drop: “The Disguise” ends with the chameleon doing one when Nolik transforms into a screw.
• Kids Shouldn't Watch Horror Films: Tom Thomas watches a horror movie about giant insects in one episode, and (despite insisting that he’s not scared) finds himself subsequently unable to sleep without a light on.
• Lost Wedding Ring: “The Drain”, the first episode of the series, has Tom Thomas accidentally dropping his mother’s wedding ring down the drain.
• The Masquerade: Fixies hide their existence from humans for two reasons- fear of being experimented on, and the fact that, if people knew there were tiny creatures around that would fix their devices for them, they’d probably stop taking care of their machinery, creating a backlog of repairs even a Fixie couldn’t keep up with.
• Mysterious Cube of Rubik: Tom Thomas shows one to the Fixies in “Nolik’s Cube”; after Fire’s attempt to solve it breaks it, he resorts to just putting it back together with the colors in their correct places.
• Mystery Episode:
  • Tom Thomas decides to become a detective in “The Magnifying Glass”, attempting to uncover who took a wing from a toy airplane.
  • Nolik and Fire try their hands at mystery-solving in “The Detective”, with an attempt to figure out who stole one of Eugenius’s screwdrivers.
• New Season, New Name: The fourth season has the subtitle “Newcomers”, while the fifth season is called “High Five”.
• Not in Front of the Parrot!: One episode has Tom Thomas watching Adeesa, a parrot his dad brought in from Africa; problems arise when it overhears Nolik and Simka, and starts uttering phrases that threaten to reveal the existence of the Fixies. Fortunately, Tom Thomas is there to Lame Rhyme Dodge out an “explanation”.
• Not-So-Forgotten Birthday: This old plot is trotted out for Nolik’s birthday in an episode of Season 4.
• Objectshifting: The Fixies have the ability to transform into screws to hide from humans; their screw forms tend to have the same color scheme as their true forms, and they aren’t attracted to magnets, but aside from this they’re indistinguishable from normal screws. Oddly, Geek and Tweak turn into gears instead.
• One-Word Title: A majority of episodes have one in the original Russian; while the English dub got rid of most cases by adding a “The” in front, a few episodes (such as “Water” or “Dancing”) still have one.
• Origins Episode: “The Screws” has Tom Thomas flashing back to how he first discovered the Fixies, and befriended Nolik and Simka.
• Our Souls Are Different: This comes up in the show’s backstory; apparently, craftsmen putting their souls into their work is more than just a metaphor, and this is where Fixies come from. (At least, this is where the first Fixies came from. As most modern devices are machine-made, the Fixies have had to reproduce the old-fashioned way to keep up.)
• Perpetual Motion Machine: Tweak and Geek build one (based on the wheel-of-sliding-weights design) in “The Perpetual Motion Machine”, although it turns out it’s actually powered by a Fixie running inside it like a hamster wheel.
• Pink Is Feminine: Masia, Nolik’s mother (and, coincidentally, the first female Fixie in the show) is bright pink.
• Playing Sick: Tom Thomas attempts to do this with the old “heat up the thermometer” trick in one episode, only to accidentally break the thermometer.
• Portmanteau: The Fixies' species name is a combination of "fix" and "pixie," reflecting how they are magical beings who fix appliances.
• Power Outage Plot: In “The Chicks”, Nolik and Fire find themselves having to keep a group of chicken eggs warm when the power goes out in the laboratory, cutting the heat to their incubator.
• Read the Freaking Manual: The moral of “The Instructions”- Tom Thomas attempts to assemble a wooden chair without looking at the instructions, but all he gets for it is a Failure Montage.
• Repetitive Name: Dim Dimytch, or Tom Thomas as he’s called in the English dub.
• Rhyme Theme Naming: The Fixie twins are Freak (or Tweak in the English dub) and Geek.
• Selective Magnetism: “The Magnet” reveals that, for some reason, Fixies disguised as screws aren’t attracted to magnets, despite their screw forms being metallic by all other measures.
• Share Phrase: “Tideesh!”, which Fixies shout after completing a job, and at various other times as well.
• Shout-Out:
  • In the English dub, Tom Thomas’s dog is called Chewsocka.
  • The movie Tom Thomas watches in “The DVD” is recognizably The New Gulliver.
  • A joke in “The Washing Machine” has a vaguely iceberg-shaped sock crash into a ship-patterned one, with Nolik commenting that they’re playing Titanic on TV.
  • At one point in “The Mirror”, Tom Thomas pretends to be Spider-Man.
  • One episode has the Fixie kids building a miniature submarine that’s bright yellow.
  • Of all the things to reference, “The Virus” shows Tom Thomas’s desktop having images of Happy Tree Friends characters as file shortcuts. They were replaced with regular file images in later broadcasts.
• Show Within a Show: The Fixies are seen watching a cartoon about a submarine at the beginning of, well, “The Submarine”.

  Announcer: And so the submarine disappeared into the ocean deep, leaving the vicious sharks high and dry.

• Species Title: The series has one.
• The Smart Guy: Digit/Ygrek, the nerd of the Fixie class who has “hair” shaped like a fluorescent light bulb.
• Swapped Roles: In “The Dishwasher”, Nolik and Simka do this with their parents- their parents attend school for the day while they work on fixing the dishwasher.
• Time Travel Episode:
  • “The Time Machine”, although at the end it turns out that Toola didn’t actually travel in time- it was all a prank by the other students, and the “time machine” was actually a device for automatically watering plants at a certain time.
  • A more straightforward episode is one of the Christmas specials, simply called “Time Travel”.
• Tooth Fairy: Basiya attempts to pretend to be this in “The Tooth”.
• Unseen No More: Tom Thomas’s friend and crush Katya was The Ghost for three seasons before finally making her appearance in the first movie, after which she became a series regular.

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