Mom Can't Cook! - TV Tropes

I'm a fish boy

Who skates for Team XBladz

With a leprechaun who plays basketball.

Come to my smart house,

Meet my alien sister;

Don't come hungry

Because I bet my mom can't cook.

The theme tune

Mom Can't Cook! A DCOM Podcast is a podcast started in 2022 by Luke Westaway and Andy Farrant of Outside Xbox. The premise is that, every fortnight, the two watch a Disney Channel Original Movie (DCOM, for short)^note , and proceed to riff on it for an hour or two. Much of the humour is derived from the pair spotting bizarre plot elements, bizarre soundtrack choices, and Special Effects Failures, and generally commenting on how bad (or, rarely, good) the movie of the week is. The title of the podcast comes from the fact that many DCOMs make a Running Gag of how bad the protagonist's mother's cooking is (hence this British podcast saying "Mom" rather than "Mum").

All episodes can be found here. There is also a side project, "Extra Helpings", as Patreon-exclusive content, focusing on So Weird episode recaps in the same style as the DCOM episodes, posted on the weeks where they don't post a regular episode.

Films covered by the podcast so far, in order: 

---

Mom Can't Cook contains examples of:

• Accidental Innuendo:
  • An irregular running gag is how certain phrases sound much more risqué than they were probably meant to. Examples include Val's comment about it being "open season on your butts" in Brink, or the dog remembering the words "Come on Susan, come on honey bring it home!" in You Lucky Dog, or how sexual the fake slang term "cranking little Bigby" sounds in The Other Me.
  • Andy describes the heroes of Stepsister from Planet Weird as "blowing [the evil emperor] until he dies". He means they use hairdryers to disintegrate him, but both hosts immediately catch onto what Andy's just implied.
  • When Alex from Alley Cats Strike mentions that there's a "weird vibe" whenever his dad and the mayor meet, just after the mayor's called his dad "Mr. 'Oops I Dropped The Ball'", Luke assumes Unresolved Sexual Tension is at play here.
  • From Tower of Terror, as said by a character to his ex, "I've got something huge; I'm coming to you first".^context
  • In The Ultimate Christmas Present, Allie's dad runs a website called "Bones for Bowser dot com". It's a site for buying dog bones online, but both hosts think it sounds like a site for Super Mario pornography.
  • From the Go Figure episode, describing a coach who's implied to have given a girl an ice hockey scholarship she doesn't deserve in exchange for sexual favours from her figure-skating coach:

    Luke: The coach enters — the room, not... [corpses]

    Andy: (Later) [The skating coach] is chewing him out — not like that...

  • They very much consider the name "Coach Tugnut" from The Even Stevens Movie to be an example.
  • Given that they're already characterising him as a sexual deviant, Shane Gray getting scolded for "blowing off [i.e., skipping] his entire class" is not missed by Andy.
• Accidentally Correct Writing:
  • They note that Pixel Perfect is a remarkably prescient discussion about the perils of generative AI, despite being written in 2004. They note that even when they first watched it in 2020 it didn't feel Applicable.
  • A Running Gag was that the films were being written and filmed simultaneously, with typewritten script pages, ink still wet, being passed to the actors in the middle of scenes. In the episode for Johnny Kapahala: Back on Board, this is revealed to have some basis in truth, with scenes often being hastily reconfigured if weather or absences didn't allow for filming to proceed as written. The gag was promptly changed, with references to this actual practice now appearing when they make that joke.
• Accidental Misnaming:
  • Stuck in the Suburbs was directed by a guy called "Savage Steve Holland", which both hosts think sounds like a wrestler's name. When later trying to remember his name, one of the hosts suggests ""Stone Cold" Steve Austin", which creates a Running Gag of using various wrestlers' names in place of Holland's. Luke even briefly forgets the director wasn't a pro wrestler.
  • The hosts keep thinking Ready to Run's real title is "The Confidence of Horses", as the name of that plot point keeps coming up in the film far more than its actual title.
  • Andy at one point accidentally calls "Twinkle Town", the titular musical from High School Musical, "Twinkletoes". Luke jokingly scolds him for disrespecting "Twinkle Town".
• Adaptational Villainy:
  • They often tend to vilify random characters, usually to extremes. Good examples are in Cow Belles, in which all the dairy workers get twisted into scammers, and Ready to Run, where Mr. Machado is assumed to have deliberately got Corrie's father killed.
  • Santa, of all people, gets this treatment in the episode on The Ultimate Christmas Present, as the version presented in that movie created a machine that can summon blizzards, thunderstorms, and earthquakes. Luke and Andy imagine him using it to hold the world hostage.
  • Jett's family get this treatment in Jett Jackson: The Movie, being portrayed as only caring about Jett as a breadwinner rather than as a son or great-grandson.
  • They briefly speculate about an alternate ending for Hot Frosty, where Jack is revealed to have been a conman in league with the town sheriff and runs off with the bail money while everyone thinks he's dead and their backs are turned.
  • A large chunk of the Holiday in Handcuffs review consists of Andy and Luke proposing that Melissa Joan Hart's character at best has committed multiple kidnappings before and is at worst a Serial Killer. They don't even get out of the first scene after the movie's In Medias Res opening before proposing that this isn't even where she lives and the real owner is lying dead just offscreen, and the bizarre way in which her family handles her "boyfriend" constantly telling them that he's been abducted and begging for them to call the cops leads them to propose that either the entire family are kind of nuts, or that none of them are actually related to her and have in fact all been themselves abducted and forced to play the role of her family members.
• Aesop Amnesia: Discussed in the Jumping Ship episode, where Michael (and, to a lesser extent, Tommy) seemingly lose all of their Character Development from Horse Sense. Given that the plot bears almost no relation to its supposed prequel, Andy and Luke wonder why they even bothered to make it a sequel in the first place: they even watched the two out of order the first time they watched all the DCOMs, and barely missed anything. Andy says the plot makes much more sense as a sequel if everyone got kicked in the head by a rampaging horse seconds after the film ended, leaving them with no memories of the events of the erstwhile prequel beyond land trusts, a sentiment with which Luke agrees.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Everything wrong with Jace's new life in Utah, according to the description of the Going to the Mat episode:

  The school won't get a beeping backboard to allow him [a blind kid] to play basketball, his music teacher hates him, and his classmates don't seem to appreciate him walking around loudly talking about how great New York is, and how everyone in Utah is a toothless hillbilly who wouldn't know culture if it spit in their egg cream.

• Artistic License – Biology:
  • One thing Luke and Andy learn from emails is that the panic over a dolphin breech birth in A Ring of Endless Light makes no sense because breech is how dolphins normally give birth.
  • In The Jennie Project, Jennie is initially stated to have been given 3 cm³ of diazepam. Luke notes that he looked up the maximum dose of diazepam that a human would ever be prescribed on the NHS website: it's 20 mg, whereas 3 cm³ would be 3000 mg.

    Luke: This ape is either going to die soon or live forever.

  • The titular band of The Cheetah Girls chose that name because "the cheetah is the fastest and fiercest feline in the jungle." The hosts point out that the "fiercest" part is a rather debateable statement:

    Luke: They're quite small, and they can only run for short bursts and then they get all sleepy.

• Artistic License – Education: In Halloweentown High, Grandma Aggie is reassigned from science teacher to history teacher after a llama spit in a student's eyes, blinding them. The hosts point out that under no circumstances in Real Life would a) a high school science teacher be reassigned to history, and b) a teacher who got a kid blinded be allowed to keep their job.
• Artistic License – Geography:
  • The general plot of Jumping Ship seems to have been written for the Caribbean (Ruthless Modern Pirates, mention of a wrecked Spanish treasure galleon, Paradise Island^note  being a significant named location, etc.), but the film is actually set, and was filmed, in Australia. Luke assumes this was for tax reasons.
  • The Ultimate Christmas Present is set in (famously very built-up) metropolitan LA, but somehow the characters can take a shortcut through a redwood forest. Luke jokingly asks if they somehow took a shortcut through Yosemite National Park (despite that being hundreds of kilometres to the north).
• Artistic License – History: Gets both Discussed, and accidentally used, by the hosts:
  • Discussed examples:
    • In Cadet Kelly, the Korean War's Battle of Chosin Reservoir is described as a very successful "advance to the rear". Both hosts had independently looked up the number of casualties for the UN troops (the greatest estimate is over 17,000), and note that this is a rather optimistic view of that battle.
    • The main character of The Ultimate Christmas Present claims to be writing a story where William Shakespeare is transported to modern times, and writes a play called A Tale of Two Pickles. The hosts are quick to point out that A Tale of Two Cities was, in fact, written by Charles Dickens.
    • While they do note that the concept of Big Bad Yan Lo commanding an army of terracotta warriors in Wendy Wu: Homecoming Warrior makes for some very cool fight scenes, they also note that the warriors were only unearthed in 1974, meaning that when Wendy's great-grandmother fought Yan Lo 90 years ago, either he wouldn't have had an army of terracotta warriors to command, or all the fighting took place in the underground chamber where they were buried, with barely any room to swing their weapons.
    • The parents in The Poof Point try to send a pair of goldfish to September 1863, to witness the Gettysburg Address. Aside from the complete lack of any reason you'd want two goldfish — rather than yourselves — to attend the Address ("At this point, Mr. Lincoln made several remarks about a goldfish, before returning to the speech"), the hosts point out that they're two months off; the Address took place in November. (Let alone the fact they didn't even say which day in September.)
  • Examples made by the hosts:
    • They make a joke about the alien puppets from Can of Worms being snatched from a bin of Muppet rejects that Jim Henson forgot to have incinerated. Henson died in 1990; the film under discussion was made in 1999.
    • In Read It and Weep, Luke states that when the film came out, the iPhone "wasn't particularly widespread". That's quite an understatement — it didn't exist yet, as the film's from 2006 and the iPhone 1 was released in 2007.
• Artistic License – Law:
  • They consider the resolution to Horse Sense to be an example, and portray it as being Michael saying "I know about estate law", and that resolving everything.
  • In the episode on The Other Me, both of them point out the absurdity of the antagonists saying that "clone-napping" (as opposed to kidnapping) is perfectly legal. This extends to the assumption that all the adults in this film are overlooking any crimes which are committed against clones.
  • Jay declaring he'll take all the blame for the dog-napping in Hounded is lampooned, with the hosts asking what would happen if one of the defendants in a case actually tried to do so:

    Judge: But he shot 2 people!

    Defendant: Yes, but I'm taking all the blame.

  • The driving test in Right on Track is portrayed as being entirely speed-based, with Erica pulling off all sorts of insane tricks to do it quickly. Luke and Andy note that in real life, the instructor would be scolding her, and possibly giving her a lifetime ban.
  • After considering the possibility that the above-mentioned "Bones for Bowser" is, in fact, a site for selling bones online, they decide it must be for disposing of murder victims. They then joke that this would lead to the police deciding the dog was the murderer, which would let you get off scot-free:

    Andy: A dog and their owner can't both be tried for the same crime. That's double jeopardy, isn't it?

  • Luke and Andy are completely baffled by The Jennie Project's insistence that Jennie, a chimpanzee, can be tried under US law, the same as a human. Aside from "the one reasonable line the judge will say" about what an animal is doing in a human court, no-one in the film ever treats the situation as unusual. Andy compares it to an Ace Attorney case (presumably thinking of either the parrot from the first game, or the orca from Dual Destinies).
  • They don't believe that the reality TV show from The Even Stevens Movie could ever get past the legal team. Given that two of the people getting pranked are a senator and a lawyer, they imagine the producers getting sued for 50 different charges.
  • They are appropriately skeptical when Mario Lopez declining to press kidnapping charges means that the only person who goes to jail in Holiday in Handcuffs is Grandma for attempting Suicide by Cop, commenting that by these standards nobody could ever be imprisoned for murder because murder victims are by definition unable to press charges.
  • Marie in The Poof Point seems to be under the impression that her family could be evicted by a neighbourhood petition in hours when the matter hasn't even been taken to her parents, let alone the court.

    Luke: "Please don't evict us today... on a Friday at 4 pm."

  • The titular Princess Protection Program is stated to be working on a "legal way" to depose General Kane. Y'know... the guy who's just taken over a country in a military coup. Luke and Andy note that the "legal way" to deal with him is surely to just say that coups are illegal, and therefore Kane is ruling illegally, but the film completely ignores this.
• Artistic License – Politics: The hosts keep commenting on how First Kid treats the US President's son as his heir, despite the presidency not being an inherited position.
• Artistic License – Sports:
  • Luke notes that Right on Track rather misrepresents drag racing as being just going fast, and occasionally choosing to go extra fast instead. He tries to point out that there is more to it than that, as there's strategy around when and how to accelerate, as well as how your car is built in the first place, although he then acknowledges that he doesn't find it very interesting either.
  • In Miracle in Lane 2, the villain is noted to have spent $20,000 on wind-tunnel testing alone. The prize for winning the soapbox derby national championship is $3000, in scholarships. Both hosts crack up at the fact that this means he spent almost 7 times more money on the derby than his kid will earn.
• As Long as It Sounds Foreign: The cut faux-Hawaiian song from High School Musical 2 got translated by a listener, and Luke reads some of it on the show to prove that the song is, indeed, nonsense and vaguely racist.

  Luke: One line of it roughly translates to, "To whisper, sharp, sharp, sharp, pinch, octopus head, octopus head, octopus head." [Corpses]

  Andy: [Also corpsing] Just a succession of emojis...

• As You Know: Snarked about whenever this sort of exposition comes up.
• Audience-Alienating Premise:
  • Implied by the description of the Hot Frosty episode:

    What if a snowman came to life? It'd be pretty horrifying I expect, on account of how he'd be like, three fleshy balls, precariously balanced on top of each other. But what if the snowman had abs? Pretty sexy, right? Also he has the mind of a child. Wait, come back.

  • They get to do it back-to-back with the description for the Holiday in Handcuffs episode:

    Xmas is here folks, and what better way to celebrate than with a LIVE recap of a film about a violent kidnapping, let me finish, that takes place at Christmas?

• Bait-and-Switch: When discussing the production values of Stuck in the Suburbs before looking at it properly in the next episode, Luke has this to say:

  And if you're wondering how they manage to show the life of an early-2000s pop star on a DCOM budget... they can't.

• Beat Without a "But":
  • When describing the council members of varying levels of attention to detail from Halloweentown High, Luke describes them like this:

    Luke: There's a person whose head is a pumpkin... there's a woman with pointy ears, and she's got a spider necklace, and, a man.
    Andy: Just a guy.
    Luke: He's got a judge's wig, so maybe that's his mutation...
    Andy: He's pretty old...
    Luke: He's kinda old. Ooooooh, the spectre of aging!
    ** A seemingly unplanned example from Andy in the Camp Rock episode, when discussing the classes we see taking place at the titular camp.

    Andy: We see a hip-hop dance class, we see... no, that's it. [Both hosts corpse.] That's it!

• Bellisario's Maxim: When a plot gets too silly, the hosts will typically invoke the Maxim before they get too lost in the weeds of how the film makes no sense.
• Bestiality Is Depraved: Andy finds the reactions of all the characters in Eddie's Million Dollar Cook-Off to Eddie cooking to be so over-the-top, he suggests that maybe until the last second his habit was "dog-f***ing", and they didn't go back and change how everyone else behaved regarding it in the script.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: In the middle of a scene in Life is Ruff where Calvin is struggling to control his dog, he stops to do a cool skateboarding sequence and the dog cooperates perfectly. The hosts are completely baffled by the tonal whiplash, and suggest it was just added in between different shots from one coherent scene because an executive demanded it.
• Black Comedy: Quite common, as most of the protagonists are kids and the hosts like to imagine awful things happening to them as a result of adults' incompetence or the weird supernatural stuff that happens in a lot of these movies. It gets particularly pronounced in the Princess Protection Program episode, where the plot of the film centres around a military coup, but nothing too bad can happen because it's a film aimed at kids; the hosts end up imagining half a dozen violent things which would be happening in real life.
• Bland-Name Product: "Gotham Man" from Life is Ruff is a clear Expy for Batman, and the hosts spin it out into a whole bland-name version of the DC universe, including "Metropolis Man" and the "Justice Legion".
• Blatant Lies:
  • After the "Kid Internet" is mentioned in First Kid, Luke and Andy spin a whole story about how, in the 90s, there used to be a Kid Internet, an Adult Internet, and a Snake Internet (because lots of the websites shown in the film are snake-themed).
  • When discussing Michael faking Character Development in Jumping Ship by getting an employee to plant a small wheat field at his house, the hosts claim that when you wanted to fake being somewhere (such as a wheat farm) before Zoom backgrounds, you would do this sort of thing.
  • In Stuck in the Suburbs, Brittany mentions there being a "swanky hotel" near the freeway. Andy promptly quips that there's a Ritz in London that you need to drive along the (notoriously loud and congested) M25 to get to. Later, the characters supposedly send a file to literally every phone in the world, and the hosts declare that yes, you have to be careful not to hit the "universal send" button when doing a file transfer.

    Andy: It's weird that they include that feature.

  • After a discussion in which they claim that branches of the military have a hierarchy based on height above sea level ("if you flunk out of the Navy, they put you in the Mole People division"), Luke declares they've just been talking "expertly" about the military.
  • At the start of the Zenon: The Zequel episode, Andy off-handedly mentions people exploding in the vacuum of space, and then tries to segue into the film with the line "speaking of people exploding in space..." This prompts a discussion about how the first draft of The Zequel was just Zenon floating dead in space, and they were going for a Cosmic Horror Story before Eisner nixed it. Later, they bring up how common the topic of dissecting unique people/creatures is in DCOMs, and claim that the 1996 Chicago Bulls were all dissected to see why they were so good at basketball.
  • They describe Phantom of the Megaplex as the definitive and best-known adaptation of Gaston Leroux' Le Fantôm de l'Opéra, and then declare that Andrew Lloyd Webber wept when he saw it and declared it to be what he intended to make.
  • When talking about how the family dog is for some reason just wandering around the lab in The Poof Point, Andy claims that it's just like Oppenheimer, and the hosts go on to describe a scene where J. Robert Oppenheimer's dog is just wandering around the Manhattan Project in that film.
  • After some of their more outrageous sentences in ad reads (such as "NordVPN makes me tingle more than any girl!"), the hosts will occasionally claim that that exact sentence is in the ad copy.
• A Boy and His X: Luke describes Hounded as the only "boy and his dog" movie where the dog is actually evil.
• Broken Aesop:
  • The hosts note that Wendy Wu: Homecoming Warrior at one point makes a big thing of "immigrants should be able to embrace their heritage", and then transitions immediately to "this immigrant will only be accepted if he's wearing western clothes", which they feel sort of undermines that previous point.
  • A Running Gag in the Johnny Kapahala: Back on Board episode is how the film keeps pushing the message that Johnny Tsunami is clearly becoming a family man and is ready to be a father now... despite the fact he already has a son and grandson.
  • One of many critiques made of Holiday in Handcuffs is Andy pointing out what a weird message it is to push a moral of "do what makes you happy" when part of that involves kidnapping someone.
  • They point out that, in High School Musical 2, the "right thing" for Troy to do is to ignore who he is because his friends don't like it. As they note, this completely contradicts the moral of the first film, which is all about how you should do what you love and be who you are, because true friends will support you no matter what.
  • The fictional Eve doll from Life-Size is apparently environmentally conscious, which the hosts note as ironic given she and all her accessories are made of plastic.

    Luke: Non-biodegradable stilettos lodged in fish mouths...

• Broken Record: Luke ends up constantly repeating the line "she's as strong as seven men, doctor" from The Jennie Project, as he's completely baffled as to how they expect the audience to believe this is the case, when Jennie is a relatively small chimpanzee. This practice later becomes common for both hosts, appearing multiple times, for instance, in the episode on The Cheetah Girls.
• Buffy Speak: Luke at one point describes what is presumably an interior transom as a "hole in the wall which they deliberately put there". Andy asks if he means a door.
• California Doubling: An inverted version is discussed in the episode on You Wish!: the film was shot in Auckland for some reason, and the hosts bring up that fact several times when discussing the film (for example, when the characters catch a tram, which Auckland is well-known for).
• Call-Back: While lots of Canon Welding goes on that naturally involves callbacks (see below), there are also other examples:
  • At the start of the episode on A Ring of Endless Light, Andy declares that he's Luke, and then scoffs at the audience for being "idiots" for actually believing him, referencing the previous episode's Running Gag of copying Jamie's habit of lying to the audience and then scoffing at them. In a much later episode, Luke claims to be reading an email on the subject of horse disposal, only for the body of this purported email to just be Jamie laughing at Andy for believing that Luke would actually read another email on that subject.
  • Andy states that Kelly's dad from Cadet Kelly has a "Cosmo Cola energy", then notes that Cosmo at least has the excuse of being an alien.
  • When a scene of Andrew Lawrence wrestling a dog appears in Going to the Mat, Luke suggests that, like Eddie's Million Dollar Cook-Off, the movie was originally centred around having sex with dogs, and this was the only scene they couldn't excise. They then desperately try to prevent this from turning into a Running Gag.
• Canon Welding: They often indulge in this between different films that, ostensibly, have nothing to do with each other. Most notably, they declare "reindeer flu" from 'Twas the Night and "the Spanish rice problem" from Hounded to be one and the same, and then when Spanish rice is brought up in Stuck in the Suburbs as being "too spicy" for Brittany's dad, they declare he's inadvertently saved her from this disease. References to Agent Simms from First Kid keep appearing in subsequent episodes as well.
• Captain Obvious Reveal: The Aesop that Marnie has to realise in Halloweentown High is that people will never get to know and appreciate you for who you are if you hide your true self from them, prompting all the monsters to take off their human disguises that they were wearing throughout the film, despite the whole point of them coming to the human world being for them to prove the two groups can get along now.

  Luke: Yeah, we figured that out 2 hours ago.

• The Cast Showoff: Andy gets to showcase his extensive knowledge of The Haunted Mansion ride in the episode on The Haunted Mansion (2003), which Luke jokes about throughout, at one point claiming that he could just say nothing for the entire episode and it would still work.
• Characterisation Marches On: As much as the US Military is a character, anyway — in the Zenon: The Zequel episode, they note how differently it's portrayed compared to in Cadet Kelly, released only a year later (but which they had reviewed an episode before). In The Zequel, released in 2001, the Military is obstructive and even vaguely antagonistic, while in Cadet Kelly, released in 2002, it's unambiguously good. As they note, however, a lot happened in the intervening year.
• Clueless Mystery: Singled out as a particular problem with Phantom of the Megaplex, where the solution to the central mystery is legitimately impossible to reconcile with the clues given.
• Cluster Bleep-Bomb: How Andy portrays the bowlers' side of their first confrontation with the basketballers in Alley Cats Strike.
• Cold Open: The episode on The Jennie Project begins with Luke saying "Ughhhhh... apes" over the theme music, before declaring that he thinks they've got their cold open now.
• Comically Missing the Point: They interpret the father's question in Right on Track about if his wife would object to violin lessons as an example, given that what she's actually objecting to is junior drag racing.
• Contrived Coincidence: They note how everything in Tower of Terror happens in the hotel lobby, because the entrance to the theme park ride was the only part of it that could actually be used as a film set.
• Corpsing: Frequently, considering the amount of bizarre storytelling and incompetent production the hosts observe, to say nothing of the wild alternative interpretations they read into the plots. However, Luke has a series of quite spectacular laughter explosions during A Ring of Endless Light, particularly during discussions of the "Bear Tambourine Circle" and the "Eyeless Planet".
• Couch Gag: During their introductions, at least one host will likely make a comment (which generally spins out into a whole bit) related to the movie under discussion. Examples include Andy declaring that he believes people shouldn't go to the Moon for Zenon: Z3, and Luke stating that when Andy gets anxious, he makes statements like "I'm here under duress! Call the police!" all the time and it's nothing to worry about for Holiday in Handcuffs.
• Damned With Faint Praise:
  • Actors are frequently described as "doing the best with what they were given". Although Luke does at one point declare that that's probably the best you could ask for. Similarly, films they like will be commended for just having a sensible and understandable plot, and good pacing (such as with Ready to Run below).
  • They note that in Alley Cats Strike, Todd's line that people will see Ken because he's "real and [he's] there" falls under this trope.

    Andy: "What I can say about you, Ken, is that you're extant."

  • When noting how Cadet Kelly has a lot of scenes that amount to nothing, we get this gem:

    Luke: I'll say this for Cadet Kelly: it is just jam-packed with events.

    Andy: Yeah, scenes and occurrences...

  • Get a Clue was the third film Lindsay Lohan had to make as part of a contract with Disney. Luke imagines that after having seen it, families would have turned to each other and just gone "well, everyone filled their contractual obligation there."
  • They agree that Ready to Run was quite good simply for having a coherent plot with actual acts and good directing. As they note, this is coming right after the complete nonsense that was in Get a Clue the previous episode.
  • Luke commends My Date with the President's Daughter for actually paying off something it set up in an earlier act (namely Duncan's talent for close-up magic), which he notes a lot of DCOMs would not.
  • The Cheetah Girls is congratulated for being current to the year it was made, which is definitely better than what most DCOMs manage. However, as it's a musical, the hosts note this just ends up heavily dating it.
  • Camp Rock also gets commended for its coherent plot, which Luke notes is more than High School Musical 2 can say. Given that they consider the former to be the Poor Man's Substitute for the latter franchise, that's quite the concession. Andy also notes that you'd probably enjoy it more than they did if you have a high tolerance for "theatre kid antics".
• Dawson Casting: Pointed out whenever it happens, generally describing supposedly middle school-aged boys as having 5 o'clock shadows.
• Death of the Author: Discussed in the episode on Princess Protection Program, when they get onto the topic of the film's notable LGBT Fanbase and all the Shipping between Carter and Rosalinda. Luke notes that it's probably not the interpretation that Disney wanted... but fortunately, Disney doesn't get to tell the audience how to interpret the films they make.
• Decoy Protagonist: They decide that Alex is this in Alley Cats Strike, as Todd is actually the sympathetic character who goes through an arc supported by the film.
• Department of Redundancy Department:
  • Due to it being their favourite DCOM, the description for the Brink! episode begins like this:

    Hey everyone, it's Brink! It's Brink week! This week we're talking about Brink!

  • Andy, on Kal from Halloweentown II:

    He explains his stupid plan. It's stupid.

  • In the episode on Zenon: Z3:

    Luke: We cut to the space station, up in space.

  • In the Princess Protection Program episode:

    Luke: As some royal twinkly music twinkles...

• Defictionalisation: They end up making "bonesforbowser.com" from The Ultimate Christmas Present an actual website you can go to (or rather, a redirect to their merch store).
• Description Cut: How the hosts describe a typical Resident Evil diary in a joke about the primate institute from The Jennie Project:

  Luke: Oh, no, there were problems with the ape!

• Differently Dressed Duplicates: Discussed in the episode on Jett Jackson: The Movie. Both hosts agree that the film would be rather less confusing if it did employ this trope, as Jett and Silverstone are dressed identically throughout it.
• Disproportionate Retribution: While Andy and Luke agree that Michael's behaviour towards Tommy in Horse Sense was bad, they think some of the "pranks" he gets pulled on him in return go way too far, as they're all potentially harmful.
• Dissonant Serenity: Luke reads all the emails about people who were "scarred for life" by Don't Look Under the Bed in a light, breezy voice.
• Dull Surprise: In Life is Ruff, one hint that Billy is lying about being Tyco's owner is that he acts incredibly unexcited to get his dog back. However, both hosts agree that the level of emotion he shows in response to such a happy situation is identical to that displayed by characters in other DCOMs supposedly exhibiting actual emotion, so they don't think it's actually effective foreshadowing.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • Under Wraps was the first DCOM, and both hosts comment on how unusual it is to see a DCOM with a proper budget.
  • For the podcast itself: early episodes had a duration of about an hour (their first one, on Smart House (1999), comes in at 58 minutes, for instance), to the point where they apologised for the 2-hour runtime of their Mom's Got a Date with a Vampire live show. However, pre-recorded episodes kept steadily getting longer after this, to the point that 2 hours is now their standard.
• Expository Theme Tune:
  • The theme tune (at the top of the page) sounds like an example, but actually mashes up the plots of 5 different DCOMs^note . It also doesn't explain the premise of the podcast itself.
  • Played a bit straighter with the theme song for the Extra Helpings Patreon bonus episodes, which - because it's dealing with a single vaguely-cohesive narrative instead of a different one-off every episode - is at least accurate to the outline of So Weird ("I"m a weird girl / Whose mom is a rock star / Strange things happen when we're on tour") and a couple of specific episodes ("Move in with Bigfoot / Brink! fell into a wormhole").
• Fair for Its Day: Defied hard with Pixel Perfect. Luke declares that he can't see how, even in 2004, the Disney Channel decided a scene with a girl finding random pictures of herself in a boy's room, with parts cut out of them, that he used to create a "perfect" holographic singer, could be anything other than horribly creepy. Andy is quick to agree.
• Flat Character: They already found Gabriella to be this in High School Musical, given how her arc is essentially a blander version of Troy's and she has no personality beyond "generically nice", but they find it even worse in the sequel, where they say she has so little personality that she essentially just drifts aimlessly through each scene she's in, giggling vaguely and occasionally phasing through walls.
• Foreshadowing: In the Phantom of the Megaplex episode, Andy notes there is a massive Plot Hole which almost every watcher will spot, then later takes time to emphasise that because Shawn got tied up by the Phantom, they couldn't possibly be the same person. No prizes for guessing where the plot hole is.
• Fridge Horror: In the episode on Princess Protection Program, Luke points out that the titular PPP is, essentially, a private army funded by a group of billionaires who wield absolute power in their countries, a concept he describes as "horrifying".
• From Bad to Worse: When Andy tries to resurrect Luke in the introduction to the Life-Size episode, he accidentally summons Mark Kermode instead (see "One Sided Rivalry" below for why that's bad). He tries to reverse the spell, but ends up with Simon Mayo instead, who is not only Kermode's work partner, but also has an annoying shrieky voice.
• General Failure: The Princess Protection Program is painted as being full of these, given that, for instance, the agent assigned to Rosalinda doesn't bother to brief his daughter on what's going to happen, didn't brief Rosalinda on how to blend in at all, blithely sends her off to a random school without supervision despite her logically being a high-value military target, and didn't try and stop the coup that got her in this situation in the first place.
• Genre Mashup: In the High School Musical episode, the hosts note that, if the same rules apply to both auditioning pairs, the titular musical ("Twinkle Town") must feature both the salsa song "Bop to the Top" and the pop song "Breaking Free". They also note that one of the props that appears in the background is a window that seems to be straight out of Elden Ring, and then there's the title itself which doesn't really fit into any of those genres either, so they conclude that it must be a very bizarre combination of genres.

  Andy: Maybe the salsa's performed by [Elden Ring DLC final boss] Promised Consort Radahn; I don't know.

• Gretzky Has the Ball: Lampshaded at the beginning of the episode about Eddie's Million Dollar Cook-Off. This is later proven by them conflating the "catcher" (the person behind the batter who guards home base and catches strikes), the "backstop" (the fence behind home base to protect the crowd, or, rarely, the catcher), and the "shortstop" (a fielding position between second and third base, covering their blind spots).

  Andy: He pops a fly-ball, I expect. Um, expect some bad baseball terminology, folks.

• Gone Horribly Right: Both hosts agree that Don't Look Under the Bed is way too effectively creepy for a kids' film, in everything from cinematography to composition (courtesy, they note, of Daniel Licht, who would go on to compose for Silent Hill, Dishonored, and Dexter). Andy declares you wouldn't have to change the opening if you wanted to make it about a girl suffering a psychotic break.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • After spending all of the Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century episode joking about how they have no idea what the connotations of the film's expression "blow an O-ring" are, they note in the next episode that they got many emails telling them that the Challenger disaster was caused by a part called an O-ring failing. Both of them are baffled as to why Disney would add this very dark piece of slang into a kids' film (Zenon was adapted from a book, but "blow an O-ring" was a Disney original, so to speak), and seem to consider it an example of this trope. This is brought up in the decription for the episode on Zenon: The Zequel as well:

    Why do they keep saying "blow an O-ring", even though we all know what it means now?

  • When discussing First Kid, they bring up how the titular kid is just talking to and agreeing to meet up with strangers online, and his bodyguard's only concern is if he's told anyone his real identity.
  • The fact that Cadet Kelly was made and set in 2002, a year before the disastrous Second Gulf War, draws quite a bit of attention from the hosts, who assume all the characters were shipped off to Iraq the next year and suffered horribly.
  • Luke suggests the reason the sequel to Johnny Tsunami is called Johnny Kapahala: Back on Board rather than Johnny Tsunami 2, and the reason they usually call the character of Johnny Tsunami "Johnny T" rather than using his full name, is because between the first film (1999) and the sequel (2007), the Indian Ocean Tsunami happened, dampening people's appetites for that particular nickname.
  • The alter ego of the main character of Read It and Weep is called "IS". This means that, if you're watching with subtitles, you get the letters "IS" flashing on screen hundreds of times, which as Luke and Andy point out, unintentionally invokes the terrorist organisation. It's about the only bad thing the film does which the hosts can forgive it for, since it truly wasn't its fault.
• "Help! Help! Trapped in Title Factory!": At one point in High School Musical, the on-screen titles read "Basketball day. Callback day. Decathlon day. Help." The hosts interpret that last bit as being an example of this trope (as opposed to the intended effect of representing the protagonists' mental state).
• Hero of Another Story: A Running Gag is that side characters often seem to have far more interesting (or, at least, worrying) home lives than the main characters.
• Hilariously Abusive Childhood: The Running Gag of DCOM fathers being awful often leads to depictions of this. They are often portrayed as beating their children, pushing them to ludicrous extremes, denying them any joy, and being very keen on gender conformity, among other such behaviour. Most of the time, this isn't too far from the actual character.
• Holiday Episode: They typically review spooky movies around Halloween and Christmas movies in December. Each Halloween, they do an episode about a Halloween movie in front of an audience, playing video clips to them rather than just audio.
• I Can't Believe I'm Saying This: When Luke is explaining just how stupid a justification "it's not on most maps" is for Princess Protection Program making up a non-existent country:

  Luke: The thing about maps is — and I can't believe I'm having to say this, the thing about maps is, they describe the shape of the Earth, as viewed from above! And whether or not you have heard of Costa Luna, the fact remains that the bit of Earth on which it is...

  Andy: ...physically exists.

• Idiot Ball: The hosts are confused about how, in Go Figure, Natasha (a character) and Kristi Yamaguchi (a Real Life figure-skater making a cameo) completely ignore how after showing up late Katelin is doused in paint and has clearly been the victim of a prank, and tell her she'll have to choose between figure-skating and "whatever you've been occupied with". Andy and Luke comment that apparently, the characters think she enjoys getting locked in supply closets and doused in paint.
• Idiot Plot: Andy fingers the climax of The Other Me as an example. Both the protagonists and antagonists are running around for several minutes trying to evade and capture each other, despite both parties having the same goal: to give Twoie the medicine.
• I'll Never Tell You What I'm Telling You!: In the episode on The Cheetah Girls, Chanel telling Galleria that Dorinda is a foster kid is played like this:

  Luke (as Chanel): There was something someone asked me — begged me — not to tell you, what was it?

  Andy (as Chanel): Oh it was Dorinda told me not to tell you that she's a foster child whose mum abandoned her. So I won't be doing that.

• Immediate Self-Contradiction: From the introduction to the Zenon: Z3 episode:

  Andy: Me and my friends think it's wrong to go to the Moon.

  Luke: [...] I don't have any further questions. Although — wait, hang on, sorry — you think it's wrong to go to the Moon?

• Incest Subtext: Discussed, naturally, in the High School Musical episode between Sharpay and Ryan, where both hosts declare that they are very lucky to be popular given how familiar they are with each other.
• Inferred Holocaust: A couple of times:
  • Both 'Twas the Night and Hounded contain background mentions of some sort of disease ("reindeer flu" and "the Spanish rice problem"), which Andy and Luke spin out into a whole pandemic^note . In the latter episode, they decide that the two most be different names for the same thing, like in many Zombie Apocalypse stories.
  • When the characters somehow send a file to the entire world in Stuck in the Suburbs, the hosts note that everyone must have been charged for that simultaneously, leading to an economic collapse.
• Informed Ability: In the Extra Helpings recap for the So Weird third season premiere, "Lightning Rod", they point out that Annie is described as a virtuoso who can instantly master nearly every instrument, but is shown rather awkwardly picking out exactly two chords on the guitar.

  Luke: Look: fine. I'm not going to sit here and be like, 'Hey, I demand top tier musicianship from the children in my children's TV show,' but maybe don't hype her up as this instinctive musical prodigy like...like a little Jacob Collier or something...
  Andy: ...and then just have her hesitantly try and play a normal chord on a guitar.
  Luke: The thing about Annie...why not just say "Annie loves music, she loves to learn new instruments?" Like...then maybe she could have not played much guitar yet, or something. Don't be like, "Oh yeah, she's Grade A in every single instrument the first time she picks it up! Watch!" [mimics a single guitar chord]

• Informed Attribute:
  • The dad from Right on Track claims that junior drag racing is "safer than the playground". Both hosts note that playgrounds don't require 5-point harnesses, roll cages, or their users to wear fire suits.
  • Going to the Mat is clearly meant to be about Jace overcoming people's prejudice against the blind ... except, as the hosts note, the film seems too scared to actually portray anyone showing such prejudice, meaning it feels like there's no stakes or drama.
  • The dad in The Jennie Project declares he's Not That Kind of Doctor (PhD, not MD), then immediately feels comfortable assisting a dying chimp giving birth, a fact Luke and Andy are quick to point out. They suggest he's just winging it based on what he saw on TV.
  • The dad in The Scream Team keeps grousing about how his (now-deceased) father was emotionally distant with him, and is suprised to see a video of him smiling. However, all the audience sees of the grandfather is him being a whimsical Mad Scientist who's built all sorts of fun contraptions. The hosts note that it's like Willy Wonka having a son he constantly berates, while still having a magical chocolate factory.
  • They note that ice hockey is portrayed as a far nicer sport than figure skating in Go Figure, despite players in both sports being equally horrible people, and ice hockey's violent reputation (which is not ignored by the film). They note that the film mostly does this by portraying the violence perpetrated by the ice hockey players as perfectly justified by the victims' actions.
  • In Jump In!, one of the arguments used to get main character Izzy (who, despite the name, is a boy) to join a double-Dutch skipping team is that he won't be actively competing, just a substitute, and thus won't be mocked. The hosts point out that he has already been mocked in the film for taking his little sister to watch a double-Dutch competition, and so those worries aren't as unfounded as the film wants them to be.
  • One of Luke's (and, to a lesser extent, Andy's) biggest complaints with Camp Rock is that it acts as though rock music is the sole preserve of an elite cadre of nepo babies, which is very much at odds with reality. The Couch Gag for the episode has them treating podcasting in a similar fashion, which is equally ridiculous. More generally, both hosts feel like the film has very little understanding of what rock is, and so it doesn't really come across as being about rock, despite the claims made by its title.
  • Also in the Camp Rock episode, the hosts note that the passage of time in the film is extremely vague, so that while it's meant to be taking place over 6 weeks, it feels like only a few days pass at most.
• Informed Wrongness:
  • The hosts note how the realtors in Rip Girls are portrayed as incredibly evil for trying to get Sydney to sell them her inherited land, despite them being willing to make plenty of accommodations (preserving the old house, keeping the beach open) to do so.
  • From Holiday in Handcuffs, due to the film essentially having a Villain Protagonist and trying to pretend that she isn't a villain:

    Luke: Jessica's main contribution to this film has been to rescue her boyfriend from kidnappers, and the film's gone, "nerrrrr! You inconsiderate shrew!"

  • Sharpay's plot in High School Musical 2 boils down to, as the hosts put it, getting Troy the scholarship he needs (and is more than qualified for) to get into the university he dreams of attending. They are at a loss to explain why, before Sharpay tries to start love-bombing him, he and his friends consider it a bad thing that she's trying to do.
  • In Read It and Weep, the hosts highlight how mundane the supposed bully's slights against main character Jamie are, as they include things like asking Jamie to get out of the way of her locker, or sending a glass of water back for having ice in it when she requested it without.
  • In Camp Rock, there is a scene where famous rockstar Shane Grey comes to berate Mitchie, the main character, for some trival issue with his food so that Mitchie can scold him for his entitlement and remind him that those below him are human too. The problem is that he's complaining about being served a breakfast he's allergic to despite having his allergy information sent ahead of time, a perfectly reasonable thing to be upset by even if he wasn't a huge star. Mitchie still scolds him like he's being entitled, which the hosts riff on.
• Inherently Funny Words:
  • From Jumping Ship, "sextant".
  • From Going to the Mat, "scrimmage".
  • From Zenon: Z3, "Moon activist Sage Borealis".
  • Andy snarks in the Life-Size episode that according to that film's writers, the word "tofu" is funny enough that you don't need to write an actual joke around it.

    Andy (as the writers): "How about this [for a joke]: "vegans"."

• Insane Troll Logic: Andy and Luke decide the reason First Kid uses a CGI White House for one shot is because "America's enemies might see it." There doesn't seem to be a more logical explanation they can come up with.
• Insistent Terminology:
  • Both hosts consistently refer to Jamie from Quints as "Marnie", after her actress Kimberly J. Brown's better-known (and previously-covered) role in Halloweentown. It helps that they dislike the character, thus making it also an example of Malicious Misnaming (not that they like Marnie much better).
  • The dog attacks in Hounded and instances of dog disobedience in Life is Ruff are always referred to as "ownings".
  • Luke always refers to the snow in The Ultimate Christmas Present by a name that reminds you it's obviously fake snow, usually along the lines of "soap-and-potato powder".
  • The competition Calvin and Tyco enter in Life is Ruff is always described as a "dog-walking-around" competition.
  • Frequently, they'll actually discuss early in an episode whether to refer to a character by their name in this movie or go with an alternative. Sometimes they'll decide to call a character after a role the actor had in a previous DCOM, such as Nick in Can of Worms being referred to as Gilbert, his role in Under Wraps (1997). Other times, they'll ignore the character name entirely and use the actor's name. This is particularly common with the Lawrence brothers, who are almost never referred to by their characters' names, but can be the case for anyone notable enough that they think it might be funny, such as the main characters of Holiday in Handcuffs.

    Luke: Is he David Martin for the purposes of this recap?
    Andy: God, no! He's Mario Lopez!
    Luke: He's Mario Lopez, okay.
    Andy: She's Melissa Joan Hart, he's Mario Lopez, I honestly think this may have been something that happened in real life.

  • Also in the Holiday in Handcuffs episode, they append the terms "whimsical", "fun", and so on to lots of the events of the movie, as that's how the film wants its audience to see the various crimes perpetuated by Hart's character:

    Andy: It's a charming aggravated kidnapping if you're doing it with a whimsical gun.

  • One more for Holiday in Handcuffs (you'd think the film was trying very hard to justify its premise or something): both hosts will not miss an opportunity to refer to Hart's character as Lopez' character's kidnapper.
• Interface Spoiler: Discussed. The end of The Jennie Project is described as being very tense: Will they find Jennie's family group? Will they accept her? And then Andy notes:

  Then I checked the runtime and there were 4 minutes left of the film.

• Irony: Luke notes that he keeps calling Right on Track by the name "Ready to Run", despite the fact that when he's talking about Ready to Run, he can never remember its name.
• Jerkass Has a Point:
  • They point out that Agent Morton from First Kid is entirely correct in that someone who likes to joke around during his job shouldn't be a Secret Service Agent, and yet he's portrayed as a stick-in-the-mud.
  • Ricky "Rules" from Phantom of the Megaplex is noted as receiving a similar treatment for wanting to stick to their Union's code.
  • Natasha from Go Figure, while she is being very mean, is noted to be correct about the Olympics being a more attractive prospect for Katelin than the ice hockey championship, especially as the championship, unlike the Olympics, could come up again the next year. They even point out that Katelin's actual friends are encouraging her to do the Olympics, not the championship! Katelin is the only character who considers it to be a conflict.
• Jive Turkey:
  • Their attempts to mimic surfing slang for Johnny Tsunami come across this way. They describe the episode as "totally nectar" and claim it goes "richter at Backdoor, East Coast style".
  • Similarly (this time Lampshaded), for Alley Cats Strike:

    Description: Peel your ears and get hip to this, daddy-os, Mom Can't Cook! is making the scene with a flick that is as confusingly 1950s as this sentence.

• Kiddie Kid: Lampshaded in the episode on The Poof Point, where the hosts note that the parents are saying "goo-goo ga-ga" even though they're meant to be mentally 7 years old.
• The Law of Conservation of Detail: Lampshaded by Luke:

  Nobody in a DCOM ever says a date unless that date is Christmas, or there's a clash coming up.

• Letting the Air out of the Band: Happens at the start of the Can of Worms episode. After Andy introduces himself with a bit related to the film, Luke gives the instruction to cut the music, as he "wants to start this episode on a war footing" (due to Disney+ removing a bunch of content, including most DCOMs, from the EMEA region, which includes the UK). The theme music stops with a mix of this trope and a Record Scratch.
• Low Count Gag: In Jump In!, the heroic double-Dutch team comes 4th place in a competition... in which the hosts only counted 3 teams, which they take as an indication of the team doing appallingly badly.
• Lyrical Shoehorn: "I Want Everything" by Hope 7 plays in Go Figure. Andy initially doesn't believe they're a real band, citing the lyric "that brassy golden ring" as an unbelievable oxymoronic line.
• Mary Sue: The term isn't explicitly used, but given how frequently comments about everyone bending around her come up, it's clear they consider Jamie from Quints to be an example.
• Malicious Misnaming: Several of their nicknames for characters bring with them a degree of hostility, such as "Marnie" for any Kimberly J. Brown character they don't like. It's actively discussed in the Extra Helpings episode discussing the So Weird third season premiere, where they have to stop and discuss how they're going to handle new protagonist Annie: they eventually state that Annie can have her own name because they like her well enough, Clu is Clu everywhere except the theme song because they see him as his own character and not just as Brink!, but Carey, who they view as an inferior substitute for Clu, is "Bronk" to reference his status as a bad knockoff.

  Andy: Bronk doesn't deserve his own name.

• Memetic Badass: Sophie from the Halloweentown films is portrayed as a ludicrously powerful witch who could do literally anything if she wanted, due to her being the only one of the kids in the first film to display any magical aptitude until the climax, and the only person to sense Kal's approach in the second. Luke and Andy are both very disappointed whenever she gets overlooked by the other characters, which happens often.
• Missing Steps Plan: The race in Zenon: Z3 is straight-up called "pod racing" (note that the film was made before Disney acquired the IP). Luke and Andy assume that the reason such a blatant rip-off was put in the film was because Eisner thought that getting sued by Lucasfilm would somehow lead to Disney making money, but they're initially not quite sure of the path between the two points. They then suggest that Eisner's wife was Lucas' lawyer, making it a Subversion as they decide the plan is fully fleshed out.
• Mood Whiplash: After both hosts rattle off a variety of 50s-ish Jive Turkey for Alley Cats Strike, Andy claims he's got polio, because that's another 50s thing.
• Musical World Hypotheses:
  • Discussed, naturally, in the High School Musical episode. Both hosts (with Andy in particular fixating on it) note that the songs appear to be really happening, except that they're never acknowledged again. Andy concludes in High School Musical 2 that the songs must be metaphorical, because Chad is clearly dancing throughout "I Don't Dance".
  • Luke gets more into it for Camp Rock, because here, the songs are indisputably being performed in-universe, but feature a bunch of instruments and vocalists which aren't present in-shot.
• Namesake Gag: A scene has to be redone in-universe in Jett Jackson: The Movie, because it was "no good for camera". As we've just seen a very good filmed and cut version of the scene, the hosts theorise the character who said that was referring to a "John Camera", whose great-grandfather invented the camera, and only works there because he's a nepo baby.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: They discuss this trope in the description for the episode about The Cheetah Girls. Andy also jokes in the introduction to the podcast that he's been scouted by some guy called "Scumbag Stevens", in an attempt to riff on this name (which Luke promptly derails).

  Description: [The Cheetah Girls must decide] whether or not to trust a man who is literally named "Jackal Johnson."

• Negative Continuity: Various horrible things supposedly happen to the hosts in the intros, ad reads, and outros of each episode. None of these are referenced again outside their respective episodes. For instance, in the Life-Size episode, Luke is supposedly dead after being trampled by a crowd desperate for Jamie from Read It and Weep to sign their copies of her book and then gets resurrected by Andy making a Deal with the Devil (Simon Mayo), and Andy gets stabbed by a living doll. And they both get hacked due to not using a VPN.
• Never Trust a Title:
  • Luke, in particular, is very annoyed that High School Musical does not, in fact, involve a musical, snarking that it should instead be called Call-Back for a High School Musical. The description for the sequel points out the same issue, adding that this one is "not even set in a school this time!"
  • Similarly, the hosts think that Camp Rock should really be called "Camp Dance", as dancing is the only thing anyone seems to do there. They go so far as to speculate that maybe the film originally was called "Camp Dance" until 5 minutes before filming, when the producers suddenly decided that kids are into rock, actually.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!: The hosts note that the titular Princess Protection Program functions more like witness protection than government in exile. This means it essentially amounts to taking the princesses to a place, and putting them in a situation, where they can't do anything to influence politics, in their country or elsewhere, while their enemies are allowed to act as they wish. In other words, the PPP is essentially aiding the very coups they're trying to foil!
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: The trope is cited by name in the High School Musical 2 episode, where the hosts point out that, if Troy hadn't been nice and got all his friends summer jobs, the film's big dilemma probably would never have happened, as he would have got the basketball scholarship away from prying eyes and thus without anyone to naysay him.
• Non Sequitur: The hosts consider the final lines of The Jennie Project to be an example, as it suddenly pivots from an attempt at a comedy film about humans trying to raise a chimpanzee, into an attempt at a heartfelt ending about how Jennie taught the humans a lot, actually.
• Non Sequitur, *Thud*: In Phantom of the Megaplex, the protagonists' now-deceased father apparently once said that movies can teach you a lot if you pay attention. Luke and Andy note that this is blindingly obvious, and suggest this was something he said as he was starting to fade. Andy then suggests he might also have said "If you think about it, Brian, purple monkey dishwasher."
• Noodle Incident: Andy, seemingly entirely seriously, brings up Luke having formerly gone to a "rockabilly hairdresser" who cut hair with a switchblade, in connection with Alley Cats Strike's general 50s theming.
• Not Helping Your Case: In Go Figure, Bradley describes ice hockey as "geometry on ice" as a way to make it sound cool. Luke and Andy are not convinced, comparing it to saying "you know, ice hockey is very much like Magic: The Gathering".
• "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer:
  • They note that in several films, there are occasions when the connection between two scenes seems random or disjointed, and feel the need to state that they aren't glossing over anything for comedic effect. This is emphasised especially strongly for Under Wraps and The Other Me, which aren't as easily findable as the other films watched (and therefore the listeners are more reliant on their descriptions).
  • In the episode on The Jennie Project, they decide that the dad is so bad in one scene, they have to play a clip of it or else the audience won't believe them.
  • For Holiday in Handcuffs, they state up-front that they've got about twice as many clips as usual because that's the only way to make it clear that they're not exaggerating how buck-wild the movie is.
• Not So Above It All: The hosts are delighted to find out that even High School Musical still has DCOM vibes, including a lacklustre trailer, a somewhat hokey plot which is scared of any conflict happening whatsoever, and a placeholder newspaper article (in this case, one which is complete Word Salad).
• Oddball in the Series:
  • They point out how unusual You Lucky Dog is as a DCOM for starring an adult, without even any supporting children.
  • In terms of the podcast itself, the final episode of 2023 recaps Prime movie A Very Nutty Christmas, rather than any sort of Disney-affiliated movie. This was done as a treat for the episode going up on Christmas Day.
  • They're amazed by the budget of Jett Jackson: The Movie, as it's based on a Disney Channel series and thus could bring in more money.
• Oddly Small Organisation: When discussing A Very Nutty Christmas, Andy and Luke are baffled by the fact that a bakery seemingly consisting of just 3 staff is somehow receiving and expecting to fill orders for thousands of biscuits within a few days, while also manning and stocking a regular shop.
• The Other Darrin:
  • Luke quickly brings this up in the Jumping Ship episode:

    Luke: Michael's dad, who is now played by a different actor...

  • Similarly, when Sam shows up in Johnny Kapahala: Back on Board, they describe him as "a complete stranger" because he's played by a different actor.
• One Sided Rivalry: Andy has this to film review duo Kermode and Mayo, as Kermode and Mayo's Take is technically a competing podcast. Although apparently, after Disney+ removed access to most DCOMs from the UK, he desperately rang Kermode up to try and replace Mayo.
• The One Thing I Don't Hate About You: Just before they start the recap proper, Luke decides to list the things he does actually like about Camp Rock at the top of the show, so that he doesn't forget to mention them in the midst of all the slagging of the film he's about to do. He lists the pacing, some of the songs, Demi Lovato's performance, the fact that the plot is at least coherent (which he notes High School Musical 2, part of the franchise he'd been comparing it to, can't say for itself), and the summer camp setting. However...

  Luke: I feel the concept of this film is an absolute trash fire.

• Out-of-Genre Experience: In the High School Musical 2 episode, Luke decides to describe the cave with a throne that exists at the resort for some reason (appearing in a deleted scene restored by Disney+) as though he were a DM. Andy rolls with it, asking to make an Intelligence (Investigation) check, as though they'd briefly turned into an Actual Play podcast.

  Luke: On a 16, this musical number plays.

  Andy: Noooo!

• Overly Long Gag: Luke's description of the plot of Cow Belles towards the end of the episode consists of him robotically repeating lines about how much money the dairy needs and how much people can supply. Given that he's trying to make the point that the film is boring to watch, it's quite effective.
• Pac Man Fever: Common in the films under discussion, and usually brought up given that the hosts are video game journalists. For instance, Suzuka 8 Hours 2, an incredibly rare motorcycle game from almost a decade before the film was made, appears as little more than set-dressing in The Poof Point.
• Perfectly Cromulent Word: Andy coins the word "engreyen" ("en-grey-en") to describe what happens to people affected by "the Grey Spell" from Halloweentown II.
• Person as Verb: In the Read It and Weep episode, the hosts use "to Marnie" and "to Quints" to mean "smugly narrating, like Jamie from Quints". (It's "Marnie" rather than "Jamie" because they can't be bothered to call the character of Jamie by her actual name, and she's played by Kimberly J. Brown, who also played Marnie in Halloweentown.)
• Plot Hole:
  • Luke and Andy point out that in Ready to Run, despite supposedly being able to talk to horses, Corrie's father somehow died in a racing accident caused by the horse being injured. Although they do suggest that it might be explained by him not trusting what the horses had to say.
  • Really emphasised in the episode on Phantom of the Megaplex, where the timeline of the Phantom's actions is completely irreconcilable with that of his secret identity, some of his actions are basically a Gambit Roulette, and others are completely impossible for just one person to do. They end up devoting about 20 minutes at the end of the episode to just how little the plot makes sense.
  • The Ultimate Christmas Present has, as part of its plot, a basketball match and people showing up to someone's house early to help decorate for a Christmas party. Neither of these would be objectionable, except for the fact that, as Andy and Luke point out, both of these are happening on Christmas Day. Why would there be a basketball match happening, or someone hosting a Christmas party not have their house decorated for Christmas, on Christmas? For that matter, they find many of the deadlines in this movie way too late, such as a family not having their tree up by the 22nd, or students still going to school on the 23rd (which, for that matter, was a Saturday the year the movie is set).
• Poe's Law: They declare that they can't come up with a parody of Roscoe from Pixel Perfect who's worse (that is, more self-absorbed and misogynist) than the real character.
• Poor Man's Substitute:
  • They describe Right on Track as being a poor man's Motocrossed.
  • While they don't directly say the words, they note that Camp Rock feels like a cynical, and thus worse, attempt to recreate the feeling of High School Musical, with none of the latter's affection for the musical genre it's (ostensibly) about.
• Precision F-Strike:
  • After Andy introduces Stepsister from Planet Weird normally, Luke just declares "we're f***ed". The background music also immediately cuts.
  • Luke declares he can barely muster the energy to think about the third Halloweentown film. Andy then points out to him that there's a 4th movie as well.

    Andy: Yeah, there's Halloweentown High and then Return to Halloweentown.

    Luke: F**k.

  • Luke's Suddenly Shouting moment in Quints opens with "NOT F***ING NOW, MARNIE!"
• Protagonist Title Fallacy: Invoked for comedy in the episode on The Even Stevens Movie, where both hosts consistently refer to main character Louis Stevens as "Even Steven" (always using both "names").
• A Rare Sentence:
  • Lampshaded in the episode on A Ring of Endless Light:

  Luke: Even if you grant that Vicky can telepathically talk to dolphins, which is a big one to give, that doesn't mean that you should listen to what the dolphin says about its own complicated birth... That was an odd sentence to say, but it was important.

  • A moment in Cow Belles prompts Luke to declare that "[Jackson is] huffily wrangling an enormous milk hose", which unsurprisingly causes Andy to Corpse.

  Luke: Well, he is! ... I don't know what to tell you.

  • Andy also notes that that episode made him say "cow afterbirth" more times than he'd like.
  • When discussing Stepsister from Planet Weird, Luke states there must be "many sensual pleasures associated with being a gas bubble".
  • The East Appleton bowling team from Alley Cats Strike is stated to look like "an Eastern Bloc bowling team". This leads to a brief tangent about "test-tube bowlers", raised from birth to do nothing but bowl.
  • Discussed in the Get a Clue episode:

    Andy (quoting Jack): Didn't you ever hear of Lizzie Borden, the dainty murderess?

    Luke: And other normal things teens say.

  • From Miracle in Lane 2:

    Luke: They probably couldn't find any NASCAR drivers sexy enough to play God. Which is not a sentence I ever expected to say! ... And yet here we are.

  • Describing The Poof Point:

    Andy: He is roughly grabbed and powdered by his baby father.

    Luke: A bad sentence.

• Reality Is Unrealistic: Luke thinks Jumping Ship doesn't look like it's set in Australia, but it was, in fact, filmed there. Luke and Andy claim you really need to film in New Zealand for it to look like Australia.
• Reality Subtext: They theorise that the plot about a TV series getting cancelled in Jett Jackson: The Movie is based on the fact that it's the Finale Movie for The Famous Jett Jackson. However, the conclusion of the movie, where Jett decides to be happy and push through with being Silverstone, is instead interpreted as Disney saying, "See? You can be happy continuing to work for exactly the same salary. Now stop asking for more money in your contract, and we'll Un-Cancel the show."
• Running Gag: Has so many that they got their own subpage.
• Same Surname Means Related: With a bit of creative interpretation - the main character in Miracle in Lane 2 is called Justin Yoder, whose surname in an English accent is pronounced like "Yoda". Andy and Luke start joking that his brother is Yoda (specifically, Bill Yoda), who's the Black Sheep of the family.
• Sarcasm Mode: From the description of the Tower of Terror episode:

  The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror is a Disney ride in which you get in an elevator that flings you up and down for about a minute. As you can probably tell from that description, it's rich with narrative potential...

• Screw This, I'm Out of Here!: From Andy's description of the unused "graduation" sequence from Fantasia 2000 (in a digression about other things Eisner did during his time as CEO):

  Snow White's got a baby, Prince Charming is nowhere to be found — perhaps he saw what was happening and left...

• Seinfeldian Conversation: Quite common. One good example is in the episode on Stepsister from Planet Weird, when the mother serves soup for breakfast, and Andy and Luke start debating whether warm soup is a breakfast food. This quickly turns into an argument about if cereal and porridge are soup, and Luke ends up conceding when Andy insists that yes, even a bowl of petrol with spiders floating in it counts as a soup.
• Self-Deprecation:
  • At the start of the episode on Mom's Got a Date with a Vampire, they note that it was recorded in front of a live audience, and claim the reason it went overtime (by their standards at that point, anyway) was that having other people in the room laughing at their jokes made them "think [they] were actually funny."
  • Luke states that his fondness for A Ring of Endless Light shows how basic he is. This joke comes back for Ready to Run, which he states is operating in "the same zone" (which he later dubs the "dolphin-friendship bracelet genre").
  • When discussing the Opening Crawl of Zenon: The Zequel, Luke has this to say:

    Luke: It doesn't do a very good job of summarising the first film, but then again, neither did we.

  • After starting the Ready to Run episode by pretending to be a horse licking the mic, Luke states he can't imagine a worse way to begin a podcast.
  • They open the Tower of Terror live show by asking how many people in the audience had a hard time explaining what they were doing that evening, followed by how many people outright lied about it.
  • They note that them overexplaining how acting works in the Jett Jackson: The Movie episode comes across like someone at a party crazily shaking the audience by the lapels.
  • Doubling as a Take That! to the film, Luke says towards the end of the Halloweentown High episode that what they were doing would honestly make more sense, and be a better use of their evening, if the film didn't exist and they were instead just doing some elaborate performance art involving recapping a non-existent, nonsensical movie.
  • They almost finish the Holiday in Handcuffs episode by apologising that the audience had to sit through the absolutely bonkers plot. Luke also appends an "ostensibly" after calling themselves "a DCOM podcast".
• Separated by a Common Language: Both hosts find the title of The Poof Point to be uncomfortable, given that "poof" is an older British slur for gay men, something the (American) writers of the film wouldn't have been thinking about at all. Not that it stops them from snarking about it:

  Luke: What were they going to do, even the most cursory amount of research?

  Andy: They did all their cursory research into science, which is why there are maths symbols on a chalkboard at one point.

• Series Continuity Error: Discussed whenever they run into ones that could even be considered a "series", such as the Halloweentown movies and the constantly shifting rules of magic or So Weird and the inconsistency of the Phillips-Kane Band years. In particular, the Halloweentown High episode frequently brings up Halloweentown lore that contradicts the events of the movie.
• Serious Business:
  • Several movies seem to exaggerate how popular certain pursuits, such as magic, rollerblading, and coin collecting, are, which is deemed to be because they were written by a bunch of middle-aged men.
  • When Disney+ removed access to most DCOMs from the UK version, Luke claims absolute outrage, comparing it to the USS "Constitution" sinking HMS "Guerriere". Unsurprisingly, one of the sponsors of the first episode after this happened was a VPN.
  • Luke and Andy are outraged at the recasting of Proto Zoa in Zenon: Z3, as well as Nebula's being reduced to a cameo.
• Shout-Out:
  • Andy brings up Defunctland in the Cadet Kelly episode.
  • Apparently, the magic words to resurrect someone are "Klaatu Barada Nikto", according to Andy in the Life-Size episode.
• Small Reference Pools: When Andy is struggling to understand strikes and spares in bowling, Luke first compares them to natural 20s, then to dice explosions, both from games they have played on Oxventure^note .
• Sincerity Mode: About 20 minutes into the Camp Rock episode, Luke launches into a genuinely passionate rant, without the podcast's usual snark, about how rock is supposed to be egalitarian and accessible to all, and how the film feels like a lazy attempt to cash in on the genre's popularity without any sort of actual heart behind it.
• So Bad, It's Good: The podcast's general attitude towards the films under review. After watching Life-Size, they develop a similar fascination with Tyra Banks' book Modelland.
• Soundtrack Dissonance:
  • The Thirteenth Year is noted for making some rather unusual choices in certain scenes, such as an overly emotional piece playing during a standard apology scene, or the rock piece, mostly unrelated to the film, playing during the credits.
  • In The Luck of the Irish, when Kyle's grandfather starts playing a dirge, Kyle starts uncontrollably jigging. Andy and Luke are both confused as to why that would happen in that context.
  • Jumping Ship is noted to have a lot of reggae music for a film set in Australia.
  • They comment on how hard the soundtrack in Holiday in Handcuffs is working to portray this story of a woman committing a serious crime in order to save face in front of her deeply dysfunctional family as lighthearted and whimsical, with Andy frequently mimicking the background music (sounding increasingly frantic each time) while Luke is discussing yet another plot point that they consider deeply troubling.
• Special Effects Failure: Special Effects are often mocked as being very obvious, although they are occasionally more congratulatory to the creators.
  • In Halloweentown, they make quite a few mentions of the "monsters of varying levels of attention to detail", which range from people in decent costumes to "person in a Shrek mask" and "man in a hat".
  • After Get a Clue has a newspaper article as a plot point, Luke starts looking closely at newspapers shown in other DCOMs to see what the articles say. The one from Get A Clue turns out to feature the same text repeated 3 times, while one from Ready to Run, with a headline about a horse coming to an inspiring finish in a race, has text about the disappearance of a couple in Hawai'i from an area notorious for its drug dealers! Lesser examples include papers with random headlines (such as "Academics" and "Wacky Cloths") in Go Figure, and occasionally, a freeze-frame yields nothing of note (but Luke brings it up anyway).
  • The snow in The Ultimate Christmas Present is stated to be gross, obviously fake snow. Given that it has to appear in every shot because of the plot (White Christmas in LA), it's stated to make the film rather unwatchable.
  • Any special effect below a certain quality threshold will reliably be referred to as "[object]_notfinal.png" (or a similar gag, such as "Windows screensavers"). They even sell a shirt with "tshirt-design_NOT_FINAL.png" on it.
  • They come down especially hard on the CGI in The Even Stevens Movie, which, they note, was made ten years after Jurassic Park (1993), describing it as "unacceptable".
• Spit Take: From The Jennie Project:

  Andy: We cut to dinner; the ape is eating at the table with them, presumably at the dad's insistence.

  [Luke makes some concerning snorting/laughing noises]

  Luke: Sorry, I shouldn't have taken a mouthful of tea at that point!

• Spoiler Title: Discussed frequently in Extra Helpings episodes, where they routinely point out that So Weird episodes will weave a surprisingly detailed little mystery where The Reveal is undercut by 1) the title of the episode and 2) Fi's opening conspiracy ramble. They particularly single out the episode "Vampire", in which any mystery about the high achievers' club Jack is being invited to join is dispelled by the episode being called "Vampire" and starting with Fi talking about vampires.
• Spoofed with Their Own Words: Both hosts will often repeat nonsensical lines from the films ad nauseum to emphasise how crazy they are, such as "She's as strong as seven men, doctor" from The Jennie Project, or "Everything you taught me will be part of the dolls" from Life-Size.
• Stating the Simple Solution:
  • In both Go Figure and The Even Stevens Movie a character attempts to deal with a drone by attacking the drone itself rather than the characters obviously piloting it, which Luke and Andy both suggest.
  • In The Poof Point, the same actor and actress play the age-regressing parents as they keep getting younger, despite the fact that the film actually hired actors to play their younger selves. The hosts ask why they couldn't just swap out the actors, which they think would also have made the film more visually interesting, and also less confusing as we'd be able to see their bodies approaching non-existence (which is the whole source of drama in the film).
• Stock Aesops: Discussed, but frequently Averted. The hosts often come up with Aesops that the films under review could be building towards, but which then aren't actually borne out by the plot. For instance, The Poof Point is theoretically about how parents and kids can have a lot in common, but any scene illustrating this central point (such as the kids having to discipline their aged-down parents, or do the same sort of work as them) is somehow omitted and instead covered only in voiceover, meaning that, from their perspective, the Aesop is, at best, an Informed Attribute of the world rather than something we get to see in action.

  Luke (On something that we're informed happened off-camera): That does indeed sound thrilling; it would have been nice to see it.

• Strange Minds Think Alike:
  • At the start of Johnny Kapahala: Back on Board, Johnny's father says that he never thought the family would be returning to Hawai'i to see his father (Johnny Tsunami) "get... you know." The hosts discover that both of them had substituted "executed" for "you know" in their notes. (The actual substitution made by the film is "hitched, tied down, hooked up.")
  • Similarly, in the High School Musical episode, both of them write that the firework effects look like the Death Star exploding.
  • Early in Holiday in Handcuffs, Andy asks if Luke got the impression that the main character's father was sexually attracted to Mario Lopez. Luke immediately says yes.
  • After Luke describes the Reveal Shot of a football player as Lindsay Lohan in Life-Size, he notes that the other characters go, "it's a g-g-g-girl?!" Andy immediately notes that he wrote that exact phrase in his notes.
• Strictly Formula: DCOMs typically have an emotional crisis point about half an hour before they end, which Luke will typically comment on when it comes up.

  Luke: The film is running like clockwork.

• Studio Audience: Once a year, they do a live show for Halloween, recorded with a studio audience. In 2024, they also did a Christmas episode in this format.
• Stupid Evil: On at least a few occasions, the hosts lampoon villains for overly complicated plots, or fixing them by accident so the heroes don't have to.
• Subverted Catchphrase: Andy really likes the phrase "like someone walked over their grave", deploying it especially frequently in the "Extra Helpings" bonus content where they recap So Weird. In the recap for the episode "Banshee", dealing with a banshee predicting Fi's grandfather's death and building a little cairn outside for him, he adjusts it to "like someone walked over her...grandfather's grave."
• Suddenly Shouting:
  • Throughout the Quints episode, Luke and Andy get gradually more irritated by Jamie/Marnie's self-centered whingeing, but they manage to stay relatively composed. However, after Jamie/Marnie tries to steal her parents' attention away from their newborn child, who is in the midst of a fairly serious medical emergency, in order to focus the conversation on herself again, Luke's composure finally breaks:

    Luke: NOT F**KING NOW, MARNIE! Their infant son is in hospital!

  • Another instance from A Ring of Endless Light: because Andy and Luke are confused as to why the young protagonists call their guardian "Grandfather", which the hosts consider to be a rather archaic form of address, they theorise that said Grandfather strictly corrected the children in their youth, leading to this imagined exchange:

    Luke: 'Oh, we're going to stay with our Granddad.'

    Andy: 'Oh, Grandpa, can we-'.

    Luke/Andy: 'Grandfather.'

    Luke: 'Grandpa, can we have a yogurt from the fridge-'.

  • Luke breaks into a full-on rant when a character from the "US Intergalactic Patrol" shows up in Zenon: The Zequel, despite humans in this film canonically having neither gone further than the Moon and Zenon's space station, nor met any alien life.

    Luke: JUST HAVE HIM BE FROM THE ARMY! WHO ARE IN THE FILM!

  • When Andy reaches his breaking point with Halloweentown II:

    Andy: IF YOU HAVE A TIME TRAVEL SPELL, WHY IS ANY OF THIS HAPPENING?

  • When Luke gets annoyed at just how long Miracle in Lane 2 takes to get to the topic of soapbox derby, the literal plot of the film (the film takes almost 40 minutes to get to it):

    Luke: He asks his brother, "What do you think is in that shed?" I THINK IT'S GOT A SOAPBOX DERBY RACER IN IT, JUSTIN! GO IN THE SHED AND LOOK AT IT AND START THE F***ING FILM!

  • When Andy is getting baffled at how the writers of The Poof Point got the month of the Gettysburg Address completely wrong:

    Andy: I mean, there were probably lots of things that you probably couldn't look up easily before the internet was widespread... Having said that, this film did come out in 2001, and also having said that, IT'S THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESS! One of the most famous speeches in American political history!

  • Luke, getting completely baffled by how the titular Camp Rock functions, after Shane Gray sees a kid is a really good drummer while trying to teach a hip-hop class, and tries to channel those skills into hip-hop.

    Luke: "Now we need to work on getting that beat from those sticks to those feet." [Deep breath] BUT DO YOU?! BECAUSE HE'S AT CAMP ROCK! AND HE'S A DRUMMER! SO CAN HE NOT PLAY THE DRUMS?! DOES HE HAVE TO DO HIP-HOP DANCE?! Does he absolutely, definitely have to?!... "Hey, you're a really good drummer. Now we just have to work on you using your drumming skills to do something other than drumming! At CAMP ROCK!" I'm so annoyed!

• Suicide by Cop: One of the comments in Holiday in Handcuffs is how very weird it is that this film that tries so hard to be whimsical and heartwarming has Grandma attempting to provoke the police into killing her.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: When Luke has to improvise a song at the start of the High School Musical episode, he blanks on a rhyme for "Gabby" and ends up settling on declaring that the main characters "are not scabby". He then elaborates on how totally smooth their skin is.
• Take a Third Option: When watching Camp Rock, the hosts note that Tess finding Mitchi's book with all her songs in it and going "I know exactly what to do" seems to be setting up for one of two things: either Tess redeems herself by telling Mitchi that she's "the girl with the voice" Shane Gray is looking for, or she goes whole-hog villain by pretending that she herself is "the girl with the voice". They're baffled by the fact that, instead, she decides to hide one of her bracelets among Mitchi's cookbooks, without any setup by the film.
• Take That!: Aside from the constant insulting of the films...
  • In the You Wish! episode, they say that Alex tanking his reputation in the new universe reaches "Elon Musk buying Twitter levels" of reputation self-sabotage.
  • In the Hounded episode, both hosts agree that the reason the term BMX is almost never expanded is because calling it "Bicycle Motocross" would make it sound lame. Andy compares it to calling running races "foot F1".
  • Luke compares the set-up of Get a Clue to that of Lost:

    Luke: And it might never occur to you that [the producers] don't know what they are doing.

  • There is so much dunking on drag racing in the Right on Track episode, as it's a sport which just involves going fast in a straight line for nine seconds or so.
  • When discussing a kid wreaking havoc in a hot dog stand just by throwing a baseball in Eddie's Million Dollar Cook-Off, the hosts compare it to the Cold Open of an X-Men film with a bunch of kids misusing their Mutant powers, leading into this joke:

    Luke: My X-Men power is destroying small businesses!

    Andy: And my name shall be "Amazon"!

  • Luke declares in the Miracle in Lane 2 episode that he can't see any reason why someone would care about spoilers for The Karate Kid (2010).
  • In the Go Figure episode, they declare that comparing something to geometry makes it sound about as cool as comparing it to Magic: The Gathering. It's clearly not meant to be a compliment.
  • In High School Musical, Ryan and Zeke briefly share a moment where the former takes the latter's proffered biscuits after Sharpay rejected both the biscuits and Zeke asking her on a date. Luke and Andy agree that it feels like Ryan was originally written as explicitly gay^note  and then it was toned down multiple times until you get "the sort of thing a Disney executive would proudly describe as 'an explicitly gay moment in the film.'"
  • In the Halloweentown High live episode, after the movie establishes that magic leaves a bad taste in your mouth, they lament the movie establishing new, not particularly compelling lore that makes magic less appealing, pointing out that T*Witches doesn't do that. After a moment, Andy cracks that J. K. Rowling does.
  • When discussing the disconnect between the fairy-tale princesses Princess Protection Program is drawing on and the Real Life princess it's trying to portray using those tropes, Andy has this to say about how Princess Rosalinda is naturally good at everything just by virtue of being a princess:

    Andy: When I imagine King Charles trying to bowl, I don't think he would be good at it. I think he'd f**k it up like everything else.

  • Later in the same episode, one of the hosts describes Rosalinda as acting with the same courage he'd expect of Princess Anne, followed by both hosts Corpsing.
• Tempting Fate:
  • After neither of them enjoyed Camp Rock, the most recent DCOM they'd watched up to that point, Luke decides to watch Princess Protection Program, a similarly recent film, next, in the hopes that it would prove that DCOMs from that era weren't all cynical cash-grabs. He then jokingly compares this strategy to having dipped his toe in the water, having it get bitten off by a piranha, and then sticking his other foot in.
  • The queen in Princess Protection Program at one point makes a statement to the effect of how General Kane will never be king so long as she's alive. The hosts take immediate note of how stupid a statement that is to make to the general who's just taken over your country and is holding you hostage, noting that she might as well say, "You'll never be king while my head's still on my shoulders," or "I'll never marry you so long as my lungs are empty of poison gas."
• The Tetris Effect: They note that the basement from Phantom of the Megaplex gives them old-style FMV Point-and-Click Game vibes.

  Luke: So many things to click here.

  Andy: You'll need to come back multiple times and combine various items...

• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: As mentioned on the subpage, one of the podcast's Running Gags is the hosts thinking of plots that would have been better than what the writers managed. Of particular note is Going to the Mat, where they note that the story has all the elements present for it to be a heartwarming tale about a blind teacher and student working together to form a jazz band in a rural town, but instead ends up being about wrestling. They decide this must be a case of a story taking on a mind of its own and going in a different direction than the writers were intending, except that in this case, the writers forced it back into a wrestling story by making the band teacher an awful person.

  Luke, on The Poof Point: There were so many off-ramps for this film to be good...

• This Is Gonna Suck: Luke often has this reaction when particularly bad films are coming up on the podcast, such as for Read It and Weep or when he remembers there are actually four, not three, Halloweentown films.
• Three-Month-Old Newborn: Luke believes this trope is exaggerated with baby Jennie in The Jennie Project, who he describes as looking like an adult chimp.
• Throw It In: The hosts propose that, due to the chimp actors in The Jennie Project just being from the Balboa Zoo, most of the scenes went in a totally different direction than planned, and they had to rewrite the plot of the movie on the fly.
• Tongue Twister: They quickly realise they've created one with their hashtag #BringbackBrink^note , and end up turning it into "#Brinkbrankbronk".
• To the Tune of...:
  • Luke sings the opening lines of Hallelujah to an upbeat, poppy tune at one point, to illustrate that it doesn't really matter how depressing the lyrics Stuck in the Suburbs' Jordan Cahill writes are when he doesn't have control over the tune they're set to.
  • When discussing the idea of a baby Phantom of the Megaplex, he sings the titular song from The Phantom of the Opera, substituting baby cries for the words.
• The Triple: The episode descriptions often take the form of this, with two normal-sounding questions or facts about the film, followed by one that sounds completely insane out of context (often an observation they made about the film that its creators didn't intend). For instance, from Wendy Wu: Homecoming Warrior:

  Will Wendy embrace her culture and history to defeat Yan Lo? Can she balance her homecoming campaign with her kung fu training? And why are everyone's clothes so dusty?

• Troubled Fetal Position: The "rocking back-and-forth" part of the trope is referenced in the description for the Camp Rock episode:

  Description: The title of this week's DCOM, Camp Rock, is misleading, because while it does take place at a camp, the only rocking taking place is the rocking back and forth by harrowed students who can't face another day of impromptu unaccompanied singing, people drumming on every available surface, and hip hop dance classes taught by Joe Jonas.

• The Un Favourite: Sarah from The Jennie Project is portrayed this way by the hosts, as she is pretty much overlooked after the first few scenes of the film. They end up joking about people overlooking Sarah and treating Jennie as the only daughter/sister in the household, and even trying to pull a switcheroo with the two.
• Unfortunate Implications: Discussed in a few episodes:
  • In the Miracle in Lane 2 episode, where the only Black person in an otherwise white neighbourhood is the one person who isn't "nice". Both hosts note that the role could have been cast better.
  • Similarly, in the episode on The Poof Point, half the neighbourhood has signed a petition to get the main characters evicted. The main characters are also the only Black characters in the neighbourhood. The hosts suggest that maybe this was written as a plot point before they were cast as Black, but they note that it still feels uncomfortable, no matter how reasonable the demand is in context.
  • In the High School Musical episode, Taylor's method of persuading Gabby to leave Troy and the musical — casting Troy (a jock) as an evolutionary dead-end while declaring nerds like them as the way forward — is noted as being very "eugenics-y".
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: Crops up sometimes due to DCOMs' often strange writing choices. The hosts will point it out and defend the characters in the episode when it happens. For example, in the episode on Cadet Kelly, Luke and Andy discuss how the titular Kelly's sincere kindness, optimistic spirit, and surprising emotional maturity in the wake of her mother's new marriage make it hard to watch the school attempt to tamp down on her individuality despite the film portraying it as a good thing. They do note that this pro-military stance certainly comes from the film releasing in 2002, only a year after 9/11.
• The Un-Twist: Luke considers the fact that Phillippe from Cow Belles is not evil to be such, although he notes he was probably conditioned by Motocrossed to assume all French exchange students in DCOMs are automatically evil.
• Values Dissonance: Discussed:
  • The movies often bring up the idea that divorce is the worst thing that could ever happen to a couple, which Andy and Luke Lampshade whenever it's brought up.
  • Luke snarks at one point about how DCOMs require everyone to be heteronormatively paired by their conclusions.
  • They seem to be a bit irritated at how OK a character is with the idea of spanking the titular First Kid.
  • When an internet-booked holiday is shown in Jumping Ship, Luke notes how this is meant to be all sketchy, rather than the perfectly normal thing it would be now. Later, they note that the existence of shrunken heads in, supposedly, Australia, is an "obnoxious stereotype".
  • They note that Cadet Kelly seems to think the military is "A-OK", which draws a bit of snark. Direct reference is made to the film being from 2002, and all the patriotic fervour that was happening during that time period.
• Verbal Tic:
  • Luke will often begin his sentences with "now, look..." when he's about to particularly vigorously criticise a part of a movie.
  • Both of them are likely to say "stop everything" when about to embark on a tangent about a very small detail.
  • Andy will say "so it's good, actually" after coming up with a (usually facetious) justification for a plot hole.
  • When there's foreshadowing that goes nowhere for no apparent reason, Luke will generally say, "This is nothing."
  • When Andy imitates Fi from So Weird, every paragraph reliably ends with the phrase, "Oh my God, it could happen," no matter what he was mimicking her saying.
• Watsonian versus Doylist: In the Halloweentown High episode, Luke asks why the Knight of the Iron Dagger didn't just stab the kids he wants to kill. He then clarifies that, of course, he knows why they didn't put that in a Disney film aimed at tweens, but he points out that it's nonsensical to claim that there's this order of knights determined to kill all magical creatures, and then show them scaring said creatures but no further.
• Waxing Lyrical: Andy begins the Get a Clue episode by quoting the film's title theme.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?:
  • Don't Look Under the Bed is noted as being way too scary for kids, being a very effective horror film for much of its runtime.
  • Life-Size is described by the hosts as a "sex comedy" with a "sinister energy", which again is very inappropriate for what is ostensibly a kids' film.
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • DCOMs very regularly leave plot points unresolved, so much so that noting that a plot point never comes up again is a Running Gag.
  • Both hosts are somewhat weirded out that the last appearance of Grandma in Holiday in Handcuffs is her being arrested for threatening the police with a firearm, leading them to conclude that Grandma dies in prison.
• Who's on First?: The main character of the fictional book that Read It and Weep's plot centres around is called "IS". The hosts comment that this makes sentences involving her so much harder to say or parse, with Andy briefly referencing the trope namer.
• Who Names Their Kid "Dude"?:
  • Luke and Andy agree that you can't just date someone called "Cosmo Cola", because while you don't know where they got that name from, you know it can't be from a good place.
  • They think the name "J. B. Haliburton" sounds like a fashion store rather than a person's name.
• Why Didn't I Think of That?: While recapping Holiday in Handcuffs, they joke that this phrase must have gone through the main character's head when her brother simply apologises and tells them his girlfriend had something come up that meant she couldn't make it to the family get-together, rather than, as she had done, kidnapping someone at gunpoint.
• Wiki Walk:
  • One of Luke's strategies for dealing with a movie he really isn't enjoying is to start researching the careers of the people involved to distract him from the screen. H-E Double Hockey Sticks gets him to the point of digging into Vanilla Ice's nu-metal career because the movie puts in a Take That! at his expense. He ends up broadening this to just going on various loosely-connected research tangents for Life-Size, including the most popular toys in 2000 and the duration of American Football games.
  • The hosts end up going down a rabbit hole of Goodreads reviews for the book Can of Worms was based on, trying to find a succinct summary of the differences between book and film. They end up discovering two other weird-sounding books by the same author, but not what they're looking for.
• Wild Card Excuse: They joke that the doctor in Hot Frosty must use the excuse, "I can't help them, they're a [snowman, hot-dog, whatever] in human form" whenever she can't save a patient.
• Writer Behind the Times: DCOM writers had an outdated understanding of contemporary children's culture, which the hosts never fail to mock.
• You Were Trying Too Hard: Luke's attitude towards Camp Rock in comparison to High School Musical. He notes that the latter film is at least earnest, even if naïvely so, whereas he feels the former is a very deliberate, cynical attempt to recreate that energy, which falls flat.