Small Soldiers/YMMV
- Anvilicious: Joe Dante isn't exactly subtle in how he views "war toys" like G.I. Joe.
- Cliché Storm: Chip Hazard's entire mode of speech.
- Complete Monster: Chip Hazard starts to border on this trope as the film goes on.
- Crowning Moment of Awesome:
- Alan introduces Nick Nitro to his kitchen garbage disposal.
- Kirsten Dunst's garage door explodes and the Commando Elite race out on a fleet of home-made vehicles, as Edwin Starr's 'War' kicks in.
- Crowning Music of Awesome: "War! Huh! Good God, y'all! What is it good for?"
- "Ride of the Valkryies" during the final battle, in a Shout-Out to Apocalypse Now.
- Also one of the very few movies that Led Zeppelin have allowed to feature one of their songs.
- Fridge Horror: Think about it. This town can't have been the only place the toys got shipped too. What happened everywhere else!?
- Answered in movie, Original-Chip got reinforcement from the mall the rest were shipped to, the implication being that only Original-Chip was activated early. The Rest were probably recalled.
- It's actually a good thing the original toys got found out on this small scale before they were shipped out - especially if they can bust out of their own cases.
- Hilarious in Hindsight: Kevin Dunn plays the father of a kid who gets in over his head trying to impress a girl, and their house gets destroyed by a group of toys. And he gets paid off so he won't tell anybody about it.
- The Commando Elite comprise a hard-as-nails veteran who pretty much embodies every war movie trope in existence, a massive, buzz-cut-sporting heavy weapons expert, a sniper who also carries several varieties of flamethrower, a slimy chain-smoking backstabber, a pint-sized scout wearing a mic and earpiece, and a suicidally enthusiastic demolition guy. And they're ALL expert engineers and brilliant-but-unethical medics. Who start out with ordinary military kit, but then build themselves increasingly crazy weapons out of stuff they find lying around. Whew. Sounds like prime material for a game adaptation to me...
- Rooting for the Empire: Note to Hollywood: If you don't want people sympathizing with your villains, you should probably stop making them 10x cooler than the heroes.
- Or give them several times as much screen time, almost to the point of making them Villain Protagonists.
- Also, don't then only release three of them in toy form - two in the UK - as opposed to an entire set of Gorgonites and Flatchoo, who wasn't even a Gorgonite.
- Given that the Commando Elite are in universe the good guys it makes sense they would be cool.
- Actually, the creator of the Gorgonite line did a little tinkering so that the Commandos were the bad guys. Even then, though, this trope may still apply.
- This also happened for one of the same reasons it happened in Avatar (film) (which some observers humorously noted seemed to be borrowing heavily from this movie). The Commandos are hard-bitten men of action living by their own personal code, while the Gorgonites are smugly superior nonhumans always ready with a lecture.
- Tear Jerker: "Nick Nitro's battery has run out. But his memory will live on!"
- The final scene.
- Uncanny Valley: Definitely the Gwendy dolls after they've been "drafted" into the Commando Elite's service.
- Unfortunate Implications: Nothing goes wrong with the Commando Elite's AI to make them evil; they become the bad guys simply by gaining sentience. Says a hell of a lot on what Joe Dante thinks about not just "war toys," but on people in the armed services in general.
- Also he apparently couldn't even conceive of peaceful, intellectual explorers that were also human.