Edgar & Ellen

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

If ever in your life you are faced with a choice,
 A difficult decision, a quandary,
 Ask yourself, "What would Edgar and Ellen do?"
 And do exactly the contrary.

Edgar & Ellen is a series of children's books by Charles Ogden[1] that was adapted into an animated series. The title characters, a pair of 12-year-old twins, are notorious pranksters who cause mischief and mayhem in the town of Nod's Limbs. The two of them live in a thirteen-story house on the edge of town with their pet (named 'Pet'), a strange creature that vaguely resembles a one-eyed, hairy mop head. Their groundskeeper, Heimertz, lives in a shack near the house, never says a word, and wears a perpetual Slasher Smile. There is also a junkyard near the house where the twins get parts for the many unlikely contraptions that they build. Nod's Limbs itself is an overly cheerful town run by the inept Mayor Knightleigh. His daughter, Stephanie Knightleigh, is Edgar and Ellen's main rival in their quest for amusement.

The books and the animated series start with similar setups, but soon diverge. While the book series moves into an overarching plot, the animated series focuses on day-to-day hijinks.

As of 2021, the books in the series are:

  1. Rare Beasts (2003)
  2. Tourist Trap (2004)
  3. Under Town (2004)
  4. Pet's Revenge (2006)
  5. High Wire (2006)
  6. Nod's Limbs (2007)
  7. Hot Air (2008) [2]
  8. Frost Bites (2008)
  9. Split Ends (2009)

The first six books comprise the first series, while the final three books form a sequel series.

Additional material includes: Mischief Manual (2007), Hair 'Em Scare 'Em: A Pop-Up Misadventure (2007), and Graphic Novelty: A Comic Collection (2009).

The animated series has 26 episodes, 24 of which were aired in 2007 and 2008.

The following tropes are common to many or all entries in the Edgar & Ellen franchise.
For tropes specific to individual installments, visit their respective work pages.

Tropes shared by the books and TV series

  • Absurdly Spacious Sewer: Explained in the books. First, they're the storm drain variety of sewer, not the sewage kind. Second, they were originally built so that people could take leisurely, well-lit strolls in them, but gradually fell into disrepair and had the lighting grates paved over.
  • Alpha Bitch: Stephanie Knightleigh
  • Anti-Hero / Villain Protagonist: In the books, the twins are Villain Protagonists in the first book and Anti-Heroes in the rest. In the cartoon, it varies from episode to episode.
  • Black Sheep: Miles is sometimes shown as one of these within his family, such as when he's the only one to take interest in Ellen's carnivorous plant.
  • Brainless Beauty: Blake Glide
  • Brother-Sister Team: Edgar and Ellen, when they're not busy pranking each other.
  • Cheerful Child: Miles
  • Complexity Addiction: Edgar falls into this sometimes.
  • Creepy Child: Edgar and Ellen.
  • Drunk with Power: Both the books and cartoon have examples of this; see below for details.
  • Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette: Edgar and Ellen.
  • Fat Idiot: The Mayor, at least by our standards. By Nod's Limbs standards, he's perfectly average.
  • Flash Back:
    • The prologues of High Wire and Nod's Limbs.
    • In the animated series, the "Heimertz Family Album" segments serve to reveal bits of Heimertz's past this way.
  • Gadgeteer Genius: Both of the twins to some extent, but especially Edgar. Exaggerated in the animated series, where they build much more elaborate contraptions.
  • Girl Posse: Stephanie has one in Cassidy Kingfisher and Pepper Poshi, mostly in the TV series due to the books' lack of school scenes. The books mention a couple of others too, but these two seem to be at the top of the pecking order.
  • Half-Identical Twins
  • Limited Wardrobe: The twins wear the same striped footie pajamas all the time.
  • Mad Scientist: Edgar. Ellen could qualify as a mad botanist, given the way she dotes over her carnivorous plant.
  • Man-Eating Plant: Ellen has one, but it's not big enough to actually eat anyone.
  • Non-Human Sidekick: Pet
  • Our Founder: A statue of the town's founder, Augustus Nod, sits in the middle of the park.
  • Parental Abandonment: The twins' parents apparently left years ago on an around-the-world holiday, and haven't been heard from since. The twins never really questioned this, oddly enough.
  • Perpetual Smiler: Heimertz.
  • The Pig Pen: The twins don't really bother much with hygiene.
  • The Prankster: Of course.
  • Prehensile Hair: Pet
  • Shadowland: Nod's Limbs has Smelterburg in the TV series, and Lach Lufless in the books.
  • Shout-Out: The twins' names, to Edgar Allan Poe. They even have a bust of him in their home.
  • Slasher Smile: Just...Heimertz.
  • The Speechless: Pet
  • Spoiled Brat: Stephanie Knightleigh
  • Sugar Bowl: Nod's Limbs, though it's not as extreme as most examples. Also Frøsthaven and Cougar Falls (both from the books).
  • Theme Twin Naming
  • Thirteen Is Unlucky: The twins' house has thirteen floors, and their mere presence is certainly bad luck for the rest of town. In a sort-of aversion, though, only eleven of those stories are above ground; the other two are basement levels.
  • Trickster Twins
  • The Voiceless: Heimertz

Tropes from the books

  • Anti-Villain: Eugenia
  • Artifact of Attraction: The balm, to some.
  • Big Bad: Stephanie in the Nodyssey books.
  • Big Damn Heroes: Heimertz in Nod's Limbs.
  • Bittersweet Ending:
    • Frost Bites, as the twins are forced to separate at the end.
    • Under Town--the one thing that keeps it from being a total Downer Ending is the seed that's beginning to sprout.
  • Broken Pedestal: Ormond the Impossible, to Edgar.
  • The Chase: The Nodyssey books are all about this.
  • Cut Short: As it stands, it looks unlikely that the series will continue, with a number of storylines and plots still unresolved.
  • Defector From Decadence: Miles Knightleigh.
  • The Determinator: Stephanie, whose Determinator side shines full-force in the Nodyssey books.
  • Downer Ending: Under Town and High Wire. For the former, there is one ray of hope left, noted above under Bittersweet Ending.
  • Drunk with Power:
    • Edgar in Split Ends.
    • Balm apparently has this effect on people; the condition is known as Mad Duke's Disease.
  • Family-Unfriendly Death: Uta Glögg, in her madness, leaping and falling to a fiery death, though it's not actually "seen" as Ellen looks away at the last minute.
  • Gold Fever: The town eventually succumbs to this in Nod's Limbs, after many days of working on the treasure hunt together finally wear down their spirits.
  • Humiliation Conga: Rare Beasts. Not only was the twins' scheme a complete failure, they get blasted with hoses and left lying in the mud, while all the kids they wronged get some payback as they walk past by insulting them, kicking mud at them, pulling their hair, etc. Oh, and a jar of fire ants from earlier broke, so they're swarming all over the twins and biting them. You can't say they didn't deserve it, though...
  • Idiot Ball: Edgar in Split Ends. He goes a bit unhinged in his isolation and ends up derailing his plans for some needlessly complicated personal vengeance, which both fails and lands him in deeper trouble.
  • Immortality: Regularly consuming balm will grant Type II. This is how Augustus Nod survived underground for 200 years.
  • Kubrick Stare: The Mayor in an illustration in Nod's Limbs.
  • Laser-Guided Karma: Rare Beasts puts the twins through a Humiliation Conga at the end, and Tourist Trap--despite the twins having far more sympathetic goals this time around--ends with them getting caught in a rain of pigeon poop.
    • In "Rare Beasts" the twins cause untold misery when they steal all the pets in town. In "Nod's Limbs" they are desperately trying to save their own.
  • Lawful Stupid: Everyone in Lach Lufless.
  • Malaproper: Augustus Nod frequently uses these.
  • Plot Device: Balm. Eventually, everything comes back to balm.
  • Rhymes on a Dime
  • Riding Into the Sunset: Hot Air ends with the twins leaving Nod's Limbs in a hot-air balloon as the sun rises.
  • Samus Is a Girl: The Mason.
  • Saving the World: The plot of the Nodyssey books.
  • The Scapegoat: The mayor makes Bob the intern wear a disguise and pretend to be the Mason so he can arrest him.
  • Something Only They Would Say: How the twins test each other when they reunite in Split Ends.
  • Stand Alone Book: Rare Beasts is unique in that it has no direct ties to the rest of the series. It basically serves as an introduction to the life of the twins.
  • Story Arc: The 'original' series has its own. The Nodyssey books are the start of another.
  • Inner Dialogue: Edgar in Split Ends.
  • Wham! Line: The man gave a smile so wide and eerie that both Pierre and Robbins recoiled. "My name," he said, "is Sigmund Heimertz."

Tropes from the TV series

  1. ↑ actually a pen name used by multiple authors
  2. ↑ The first book in the Nodyssey sub-series
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