{"id":31991,"date":"2019-10-20T04:38:10","date_gmt":"2019-10-20T08:38:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=31991"},"modified":"2019-10-20T04:52:04","modified_gmt":"2019-10-20T08:52:04","slug":"the-grim-adventures-of-billy-and-mandy-remains-a-treat-for-horror-buffs-young-and-old","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2019\/10\/20\/the-grim-adventures-of-billy-and-mandy-remains-a-treat-for-horror-buffs-young-and-old\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cThe Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy\u201d Remains a Treat for Horror Buffs Young and Old"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Few people actually recall that Maxwell Atoms\u2019 iconic characters, Billy and Mandy, were first introduced as part of Cartoon Network\u2019s \u201cGrim & Evil\u201d where they shared a series with the cast of Evil Con Carne. Though \u201cGrim & Evil\u201d only lasted 30 episodes, the pint-sized hell-raisers would soon live on in one of the most successful spin-offs of all time from Cartoon Network\u2019s golden age: \u201cBilly & Mandy\u201d (as I\u2019ll refer to it from here on out) is one of the last really great series from the CN\u2019s \u201cCartoon Cartoon\u201d era.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy.\u201d Starring a (somewhat) moronic young boy named Billy (Peter Horvitz), and his devious megalomaniacal friend Mandy (the legendary Grey Delisle), the show\u2019s pilot (part of Grim & Evil) involved the Grim Reaper (Greg Eagles) coming to collect the soul of Billy and Mandy\u2019s dying hamster. However, Billy and Mandy aren\u2019t prepared to let their favorite pet go just yet and challenge the Reaper to a wager: a limbo contest. If the children win, he will be required to become their slave for all eternity. If they lose, the Reaper gets to take the hamster and the kids. The children cheat (of course!) and, as we already know, they find a new best friend in the skull-faced \u201cGrim.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Grim\u2019s presence, along with his magic scythe, allows the demented pair of kids to go on some truly horrific misadventures and confront all sorts of gruesome monsters, hideous ghouls and ugly underlings\u2026most of whom want Grim\u2019s scythe. Among some of the best episodes is \u201cBrown Evil,\u201d in which Billy and Mandy do battle with a horde of the walking dead (thanks to a batch of bad brownies Grim makes) alongside a cleft-jawed horror hero named Hoss Delgado. Another episode titled \u201cThe Crawling Niceness,\u201d finds Billy accidentally fathering a giant spider (Jeff) willing do anything to please Billy\u2026who so happens to be terrified of spiders.<\/p>\n

The series was also never afraid to get epic, featuring multi-part episodes and hour long specials. For a long time Billy & Mandy made Halloween an event to behold, and they did so with great specials like \u201cBilly and Mandy\u2019s Jacked Up Halloween\u201d where they do battle with an undead prankster named Jack who rises from the grave with a Jack O Lantern for a head, and plans to steal Grim\u2019s scythe to help him rule the world. Another special holiday episode involved Billy and Mandy learning that Santa Claus is, in fact, a blood sucking vampire who was spawned by his wife Mrs. Claus, an omnipotent and very powerful head vampire.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>A wacky and hilarious twist on horror\/fantasy, the series pays homage to quite a number of films, TV series and directors including Dragon Ball Z, Harry Potter, Evil Dead and John Carpenter; although the show also created a myriad of memorable characters and twisted villains which were uniquely its own. Atoms was able to get as wild as he wanted with the series, often opting for morbid humor, edgy adult humor, breaking the fourth wall constantly, and was also never afraid to reference other network\u2019s series. In one episode, Mandy\u2019s happiness creates a rift in her dimension, and the trio of title characters somehow awakens as The Powerpuff Girls. Another hilarious crossover features the trio accidentally thawing out a caveman from a certain Hanna Barbera show about a \u201cmodern stone-age family.\u201d<\/p>\n

Through and through, Atoms always kept every episode fast paced and filled with laugh out dark humor that embraced the horror genre and created a very memorable, often hysterical amalgam for audiences of all ages. If you\u2019ve never seen The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy, it really deserves to be discovered this Halloween. And if you, like me, have seen it\u2014it deserves to be re-visited, if only because it was just so damn brilliant.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Few people actually recall that Maxwell Atoms\u2019 iconic characters, Billy and Mandy, were first introduced as part of Cartoon Network\u2019s \u201cGrim & Evil\u201d where they shared a series with the cast of Evil Con Carne. Though \u201cGrim & Evil\u201d only lasted 30 episodes, the pint-sized hell-raisers would soon live on in one of the most […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,17],"tags":[99,219,349,477,580,703,737,1008,1087],"class_list":["post-31991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-halloween-horror-month","category-tv-tomb","tag-animation","tag-comedy","tag-fantasy","tag-horror","tag-kids","tag-mystery","tag-nostalgia","tag-supernatural","tag-thriller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31991"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31991\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32162,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31991\/revisions\/32162"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}