Nutty Squirrel

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"Behold your lord and master... me!"

One mild but demonstrative beating for the terrible pun later, we must admit that squirrels are indeed creatures that, for some reason or another, tend to easily elicit wild reactions from people.

Some people find them amusing -- maybe because they appear to be such little ditzes when they're in motion, or because "squirrel" is an Inherently Funny Word. For other folks, squirrels are evil pests that are the bane of human existence, with an entire webpage dedicated to explaining why.

Because of their often amusing or annoying nature, squirrels are often included (mostly in Western works) to either lighten up the mood or drive people crazy, though more of their appearances are for humor than annoyance.

Whatever you do, don't let them get their paws on caffeine.

Examples of Nutty Squirrel include:

Anime

• Kodocha's Maro-chan, though he's irregularly referred to as a chipmunk in some English versions. Slightly inverted because he himself is pretty tame; the zany aspect is that he lives in the ever-stranger headdresses Sana's mother comes up with. While she's wearing them.
  • In the manga, the writer discusses her pet squirrel and how he's the exact opposite of Maro-chan.
• In Mobile Police Patlabor, Episode 4 'Journey to Demon Mountain' pits the Patlabour Team and their Humongous Mecha against a Kaiju created by a shady medical lab hidden in the forest. The huge creature is tremendously agile, and in the very best Alien-style, never fully seen. At the end, the team is eagerly arguing about whether it was a giant bear, rat, black panda, cat, mole or grendel (whatever that is)... but from the viewer's perspective, it was almost certainly a giant mutant squirrel. And true to type, it did indeed manage to drive both the team's pilots crazy (not a very long drive, granted.)
• Inspector Fumimaro Ayanokouji from Detective Conan has a really cute pet squirrel, which he carries everywhere in his breastpocket.

Comic Books

• The Marvel Universe features Squirrel Girl, a hero who has many powers borrowed from squirrels, as well as the ability to command them to do her bidding. This may seem useless, but she's also one of the few heroes who has racked up wins against some of Marvel's biggest villains... including Doctor Doom. Yes, THAT Doctor Doom. No lie.
• One of the Green Lantern Corps Members was Ch'p, a squirrel-like alien.

Commercials

• A squirrel is the catalyst for the gag in this Bridgestone tire commercial.
• Commercials for the now-discontinued "Clusters" cereal had a mischievous squirrel trying to steal the cereal from the person trying to eat it.
• "Who am I? What am I? Why'd I cut my hair, I look like a squirrel." Johnson's Baby Powder commercial from the 70's.
• EDS had an ad about Running of the Squirrels
• Sprite did a commercial as part of their "Image is everything" slogan in The Nineties, pointing out that Squirrels are loved and rats are hated, solely because squirrels have cute tails.
• The animated squirrels in the original ads for the PSP, though in this case, it's probably their creators who are nuts:

Squirrel 1: Hey! Come on outside! Squirrel 2: I can't! I'm playing NUT! Squirrel 1: But there's portable nut! Squirrel 2: WHAAAAT?!? Squirrel 1: Yeah! It's like a nut, you can play with outside! Announcer (deadpan): The PSP. It's like a nut you can play with outside.

Fan Fic

• The heroes of Attack of Giygas is constantly tailed by a group of squirrels. The known squirrels is the leader Not Sheldon, The Smart Guy Jefferson, the space-obsessed Andrew, and Joey.

Film

• Hammy from Over the Hedge.
• Scrat from Ice Age is a sabretoothed squirrel.
• Twitchy from Hoodwinked.
• Pip (technically a chipmunk) from Enchanted.
• Though not a direct example, the dogs from Up are-- SQUIRREL!-- very easily distracted.
• In National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, Clark accidentally brings a squirrel into the house with the new Christmas tree, causing a wild chase scene when it is discovered.
  • SQUIRREL!!!
• In one scene in Night at the Museum 2, the action-figure-sized Octavius must battle a fearsomely large creature... which, of course, turns out to be a normal-sized squirrel. He wins, and rides the squirrel into the museum.
• Squirrels appear as recurring animals in various animated Disney movies such as Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs, Bambi, and Sleeping Beauty. And Especially Sword in The Stone

Literature

• The black squirrels of Mirkwood Forest in The Hobbit.
• The book The Fire Within, supposedly about dragons, has more to do with squirrels.
• The Redwall series features several squirrel characters.
• Subverted in the second Wild Cards book, Aces High. A homeless woman who has the power to communicate with woodland creatures orders hundreds of squirrels to run under the wheels of a car on a mountain road, causing the car to skid out of control on their carcasses and crash -- all so that she could get revenge on the car's driver.
• In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the factory has a room full of trained squirrels shelling walnuts, because Mr. Wonka trusts only squirrels to extract the walnuts in one piece. Veruca Salt decides she wants one of these squirrels. The squirrels decide Veruca is a bad nut and toss her down the garbage chute where bad nuts go. (Her parents go next.)
• Averted with Cheeter, the squirrel familiar of Owen the druid from A Night In The Lonesome October. Probably the grumpiest and most blunt-spoken of the familiars, mostly because he was drafted into the job.

Music

• The Squirrel Nut Zippers.
• Ray Stevens' song 'Mississippi Squirrel Revival'. A squirrel livens up a stereotypical Southern Baptist church service. The narrator tells of bringing a squirrel to show to his buddy Hugh. Hilarity Ensues when it runs up the leg of Harv Newlan's coveralls, then escapes to run up under a Holier Than Thou church lady's dress, resulting in a Corrupt Church doing a really big Heel Face Turn.
• A recording act copycat to Ross Bagdasarian's Chipmunks were...the Nutty Squirrels.

New Media

• The internet site Fark.com was originally launched as just a funny picture of a squirrel with an amusingly large, er, nutsack. Long after Fark became the site it is today, that squirrel pic has become a running gag and undergone an awful lot of Memetic Mutation. Squirrel-related stories and headlines frequently appear on Fark for this reason, and using that pic of the squirrel is a common cliche in the Photoshop contests run on the site.
• Foamy the Squirrel from Neurotically Yours, pictured above.
• How do you know when a sports blogger's favorite team is doing poorly? When he writes blog entries about how much squirrels amuse him.
• On this very wiki: Squirrels in My Pants.
  • And Screwy Squirrel.

Newspaper Comics

• Hammy from Over the Hedge, again.
• Squirrels in Mutts get a kick out of bopping other characters on the head with acorns.

Sports

• A squirrel made its way onto the field during game 3 of the 2011 NLDS between the Philadelphia Phillies and the St. Louis Cardinals, and was immediately given a nickname (the Rally Squirrel) and a Twitter account. The next day it ran across home plate during the 5th inning, became an instant mascot for Cardinals fans, and was shown nonstop on sports shows for the next few days. The series moved back to Philadelphia for game 5, where another squirrel made its way onto the field before the game, and took seven men to catch. After beating the Phillies and winning the series, the Cardinals celebrated in the visitors' locker room with a stuffed squirrel the Phillies fans had thrown into the bullpen. The squirrel would go on to get its own mascot, be the focus of a limited print baseball card, and appear on the Cardinals' World Series rings.

Tabletop Games

• Magic: The Gathering features squirrels on quite a few of their cards. See here for examples. You can even make a whole deck revolve around squirrels. A winning movie that's banned in certain tournaments is where you kill your opponent by having an infinite number of squirrels magically appear out of a tree continuously.
• Dungeons and Dragons got Ratatosk (flying squirrel people living on Yggdrasil in Planescape), Kercpa (normal-sized sentient wild squirells, from Dragon (magazine)) in AD&D era. In 3.5, Monster Manual features carnivorous flying squirrels and "Skiurids"--evil squirrel demons that harvest nuts soul acorns from people.
• GURPS had a supplement, 'Illuminati University'. The campus featured squirrels. And vampire squirrels. And mugger squirrels.
• Mr Welch apparently tried to play as a squirrel, which tells a lot in itself.

442. When told to be subtle, playing a foul mouthed chain smoking squirrel is not a good choice. 719. A fluffy tail does not add to my comliness if I'm already 1' tall, furry and a squirrel. 999. I can't train squirrel mobs to abuse the grapple rules.

Video Games

• Psychonauts features squirrels who appear to know more than they let on, and are really smug about it; if you use clairvoyance on one, you'll see the squirrels view Razputin as a drooling idiot. You can light them on fire and eat their corpses.
• An entry in the Planescape: Torment bestiary on the Lady of Pain describers one of the many, many rumours about her true nature as her being "...six giant squirrels with a headdress, robe, and ring of levitation and illusions..."
• Pachirisu, the Pikachu wannabe of Pokémon's fourth generation. In the anime, Dawn catches one that is adorably hyper.
  • In the fifth gen, we have Emolga the flying squirrel (also a Pika-clone). Like with Pachi above, Iris gets one in the anime that loves to play cute (via Attract) and feed its face.
  • Sentret is also based on a flying squirrel.
• What game could be nuttier than Conkers Bad Fur Day? Antigravity chocolate, robot haystacks, cavemen gladiators, and a giant singing pile of doo-doo?
• Allods has huge carnivourus fire-breathing squirrels.
• In the Sonic the Hedgehog games, one of Sonic's animal friends (the animals that he saved in the 16 & 8 bit games) is Ricky, a Squirrel. Due to him originally being a female named "Sally Acorn", outside of Japan, he was the inspiration for a straightforward incarnation of him in Sonic the Comic and Princess Sally Acorn from the Archie continuity. However she is a Chipmunk-Squirrel crossbreed.
  • Ray the Flying Squirrel who appeared a Grand Total of ONCE in the Arcade game.
• The recurring "Mu" enemies in the Final Fantasy series. Generally weak early game enemies.
  • Raging Mu/Rhodox in Final Fantasy VI allows Gau to use Snare, though.
  • Mu (and an Underground Monkey variant) in Final Fantasy VII have the "L4 Suicide" move, which does 31/32 of the enemy's hp as well as causing mini... only if the enemy's level is a multiple of four. You can learn it via Enemy Skill, which can prove to be useful in certain encounters.
• Makoto Nanaya from Blaz Blue.
• The squirrel with the balloon on its tail in Fancy Pants Adventure 3, who wants you to collect balloons from bats so that it can fly.
• In the NES title Nightshade, the squirrels are secretly (and scarily) well-organized. You can sneak up a squirrel and listen to its anarchist rantings.

Web Comics

• El Goonish Shive:

Grace: Well, when in doubt, go squirrel... When bored and half-squirrel, only one solution exists: bounce around the house mindlessly!!! <boing!>

• Scarlet and her sisters from Sequential Art. Pip the Penguin encounters Scarlet... firsthand. Hilarity Ensues from there.
  • Then again, the works of Jolly Jack is comedy gold.
• The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob has the North American Grammar Squirrel, who pops up occasionally to correct the characters' grammar.
• Gertrude & Brunhilda in The KAMics were turned into squirrel girls by Ratatosk during the Squirrel Wars & in the Final Battle rode giant squirrels into battle
• Rachel from Stubble Trouble, a squirrel whose body is completely shaved except for her bushy tail.
• "And there he goes...The squirrel......has his game.
• A darkly funny variation occurs in Exiern's "All Squirrel", in which all squirrels are part of a larger hive mind.
• Squirrels are the main playthings/prey of the rabbits in The Bunny System.
• In Joss Whedon's Sugarshock, squirrels prove themselves to be the only species in the universe immune to The Power of Rock. This is because

Squirrels have NO SOULS!

Web Original

• Aquerna from the Whateley Universe. An Captain Ersatz of the above-mentioned Squirrel Girl (who ironically also exists in the universe as a comic book character owned by the setting's incarnation of Marvel). She gets her powers from the spirit of the Squirrel, which makes her superhumanly acrobatic (though not particularly strong or tough compared to some of the other students) and, yes, lets her talk to squirrels as well; her combat final against one of the tougher, but not brighter school bullies was a defining Crowning Moment of Funny.
• Nutty the squirrel, from Happy Tree Friends. His nutty nature comes from a very high sugar consumption.
• Let us never forget Frazzles, the Channel 101 squirrel from the Lonely Island's The 'Bu
• Sciurus is a squirrel-powered superhero from the Global Guardians PBEM Universe. He's superhumanly agile, can leap long distances, can scale walls with his claws, and has a reaction time that is nothing short of phenomenal.
• Squirrel vs Motorcycle, or Why the Cops Won't Patrol Brice Street. Yes, Squirrel wins.

Western Animation

• There's an episode of Phineas and Ferb wherein their elder sister gets squirrels in her pants, which leads to a hip-hop music video about it. She even screams "There are squirrels in my pants!" at the appropriate time in the video.
• An episode of Daria where Jake Morgendorffer reading the newspaper and cursing the fact that a new law was just passed disallowing the citizens' right to shoot squirrels. As he reads on, he also find that "You can't drown'em either!?".
• Rocky the Flying Squirrel from Rocky and Bullwinkle is a subversion of this trope, as he is actually the most level-headed and sensible character in the show.
• Screwy Squirrel, who is a ..You Know.
• The Tick: The Flying Squirrel ("I like squirrels!")is one of the heroes that The Tick puts through training.
  • And she turns out to be an Expy of Squirrel Girl. Seriously.
• Tammy, Bink, and their mother from Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers.
  • Chip and Dale themselves are members of the squirrel family (Sciuridae), so technically could fall under this, at least until chipmunks get a trope of their own.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: Sandy Cheeks. Like Rocky, she's often the Only Sane Woman among the main cast.
• Merlin and Wart become squirrels in the Disney version of The Sword in the Stone, and break the heart of a poor little girl squirrel.
• The "Happy Squirrel" card from The Simpsons.
  • Homer is shown in at least two episodes, "Homer Goes to College" and "Maximum Homerdrive", to be easily distracted by squirrels.
• Skippy Squirrel from Animaniacs is a cheerful little fellow. His aunt Slappy? Fine with wackiness, as long as it's measured in tons of TNT. Or anvils. She is a very bitter MEAN squirrel.
• Squirrel Boy.
• Bubbles of The Powerpuff Girls can speak to squirrels. In one episode, the girls are even rescued by a squirrel.
• The Emperors New Groove - Kronk is fluent in Squirrel. Squeek sqweeker, squeeken.
  • When the movie first came out, Disney Adventures magazine had a squirrel translation guide. So many years later, the only thing that really sticks in the mind is "Squeak da da boom" - which means there's a wall there.
• Secret Squirrel.
• The flying squirrel in Big Buck Bunny is terribly nasty.
• On Jimmy Two-Shoes, squirrels are depicted as three eyes, three legged little creatures. Though this classification comes from the Disney XD website and not from the show itself, it does fit in with the shows tendency of having it's animals look weird.
• In the Adventure Time episode "The Duke", the B-plot features an angry red squirrel that hates Jake because Jake never prints the squirrel's letters in his advice column.
• Averted with the title character of Scaredy Squirrel, who's more of a Super OCD Badass Bookworm.
• The Penguins of Madagascar has both kinds: Fred is a funny, not very smart but nice fellow, and the Red Squirrel is an evil schemer.
• The dexterity, intelligence and resourcefulness of Mr. Nut-Nut, Sparky and the rest of the squirrel helpers on The Hub's Pound Puppies makes them valued and important members of the team.

Real Life

• The BBC's Daylight Robbery documentary of the late 80s, which featured as its centrepiece a (wild) squirrel working out how to traverse a fairly fiddly obstacle course in order to obtain the nutty goodness at the other end. So awesome it spawned a sequel. (Original course featured from 1:04.)
• The Scene-stealing Squirrel.
• And if you're tired of squirrels raiding the bird feeder, there's always the "Yankee Flipper".