Mortadelo y Filemón/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Continuity Porn: The 50th aniversary special, which includes the return of many former villains and some other references to former albums.
    • Some of the returning villains (El Rana, Bíchez) were clearly Deader Than Dead at the end of their respective album, and it's offered a very poor explanation or no explanation at all of why they're still alive.
      • It's mentioned at the beginning of the story that Mortadelo and Filemón have been catching baddies for fifty years. There's a problem when you see that both the protagonists and the villains don't seem to be older at all.
      • Many (if not most) of the recurring villains were portrayed in their original album as pretty much unstoppable, only to be easily defeated in the special.
      • By far the worst Character Derailment is the one suffered by "Chapeau el Esmirriau". Not only he suffers from a huge Villain Decay (he's the closest Ibáñez has ever been from a Magnificent Bastard), but he seems to have lost his definining traits, such as his trademark silences (it has been said that he speaks more during the two pages he appears in the special that during the 44 that the original album had).
      • And it's worth noting how all of the returning vilains who were portrayed as smokers during their original album aren't smokers anymore... including Professor Von Iatum, an alien conqueror disguised as a scientist, whose cigarettes were established in the original album as his tool for breathing in our planet.
  • Crowning Moment of Awesome: Mortadelo is usually the one who saves the day. Whenever another one does it, expect it to be one of these moments.
  • Crowning Moment of Funny: The 1978 FIFA World Cup special has the chapter with Mortadelo as a bus driver. It culminates at a point where Mortadelo drives the bus on a raft and uses it to cross the ATLANTIC OCEAN mistaking it for the Parana river. That chapter is one of the most remembered parts of this comic book's story.
    • "El gran sarao" had the chapter where Filemón and the Super wrongly assume that Mortadelo has turned into a Serial Killer who decapites anybody he encounters.
  • Ethnic Scrappy: Black people are usually portrayed as relatively sane, civilized and well articulate. However, they are drawn like in a 1930's cartoon. Chinese people are a different matter - They are both drawn, and act, like in 1930's cartoons! Even Chinese space program engineers are portrayed as buckteethed gnomes who talk (and eat) flied lice!
    • Black people tend to come in to varieties. Regularly-sized, relatively slender fellows who are particularly civilized. And big, muscular men who are easy to anger. An album taking place in New York City included both varieties. Attempts of Filemón and Mortadelo to investigate Harlem and locate a suspected terrorist, constantly end with them beaten by various locals who seem to have white guys as a target for their wrath. When the two agents finally get their suspect, he turns out to be a leader of the community. Their information about a bomb was wrong. His "bomb" was evidence about political corruption and how money supposedly going into urban development, ended up in the wrong hands.
  • Funny Aneurysm Moment: A minor joke of a panel of 1992, in which a plane is seen crashed in one of the Twin Towers, Guess What Happend on September 11, 2001?
  • Germans Love Clever & Smart: Germany is the country where the series gets its biggest sales, second only to Spain. And the margin is pretty narrow.
    • One of their best stories is set in Germany, with M&F going all around the country in their mission (and successfully crossing the Berlin Wall twice!).
    • This is partly due to a case of She's a Man In Japan, or rather, They're English in Germany: in the German version, Clever and Smart are British agents, and whenever they fail against a rival/nemesis agency, it is a German intelligence agency.
    • And in Denmark (as Flip & Flop). Ibanez even made a story set in Copenhagen in honor of his Danish fans, featuring the Little Mermaid Statue as a main character.
  • Seasonal Rot: Most fans agree that it's been going on since The Eighties, though very ocassionally a decent album still appears.