Animation / Titoo

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The show revolves around the life and exploits of an intelligent eight-year-old boy named Titoo, who lives in an apartment block with his mother, father, and older brother Golu. Other characters include the apartment block’s grouchy secretary (known only as the Secretary), jerkish neighbor and classmate Shera, and the nerdy Gyan.

Although initially a grounded Slice of Life show, the series gradually began to incorporate more fantastical and science-fictional elements, becoming more of an adventure cartoon in its later seasons.

Despite being virtually unknown outside India, Titoo is very popular in its home country, and in the first five years of its existence has received twelve seasons and seven feature-length TV movies. The first Titoo movie, Titoo in Ocean Kingdom, has a separate page.

Tropes in the series include:

• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: In “Robot Watchman”, the Secretary purchases a robot to guard the apartment block, only for the inevitable to go wrong and Titoo to have to defeat the robot.
• Alien Episode: “Titoo ke Alien Dost” has Titoo attempting to help a stranded alien get back home. There’s also the ninth-season episode “Black and White Alien”.
• Alliterative Title: A few episodes have one- namely, “Time Table”, “Titoo Topper”, “Baal Baal Bache”, “Haunted House”, “Super Shoe”, “Tuk Tuk Trail”, and “Christmas Celebration”.
• Amnesia Episode: The show has had at least three- “Shera Ka Bat” (where Shera is hit on the head with a cricket bat and loses all memories past the age of five), “Secretary Memory Loss” (where the Secretary loses his memory, also during a cricket match), and “Purana Medal” (where Titoo tries to help an old amnesiac man remember who he is).
• Animorphism:
  • In “Titoo Aur Filters”, Titoo’s messing around with animal-based photo filters ends up turning several people into anthropomorphic animals when the filters are brought into reality.
  • In “Waterpark ka tedha Tunnel”, kids at a waterpark get turned into fish. Or not, as it turns out that they’re actually being kidnapped from inside the waterslide, with fish being sent out in their place.
  • In “Titoo Aur Golu Kabootar”, a stage magician with real magic powers turns Golu into a pigeon; he flies away before he can change him back.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: No points for guessing what, or rather who, gets enlarged and turns destrctive in “Giant Baby”.
• Babysitting Episode: In “Titoo the Babysitter”, Titoo and Golu are tasked with watching the neighbor’s baby, and discovering that their home is a mess.
• Balloon Belly: In “Titoo Bana Gubbara”, Titoo and Golu swallow a lightweight gas that makes their stomachs inflate like balloons and allows them to float around.
• Becoming the Genie: In “Golu Bana Jinn”, Golu turns into a genie as the result of a wish; he finds it fun at first (especially since he can use his genie shapeshifting powers to appear as his old human self), but soon has to learn the obligatory lesson about being careful what you wish for.
• Birthday Episode: The show has had three- “Titoo For Tat” (Rinky-Pinky’s birthday; Shera scares her, and Titoo comes up with a plan to teach him a lesson), “Ganna Ka Gift” (Ganna’s; Titoo ends up without a gift for her because of his attempt to help an old lady), and “Principal Ka Birthday” (the Principal’s; Shera tries to ruin his party, and Titoo steps up to stop him).
• The Bully: Shera is a local kid who enjoys tormenting people with his pranks, and is often seen as the villain of episodes.
• Camping Episode: The show has two- “Camping” (where a group of kids, including Titoo and Shera, go on a camping trip and compete to win the “camping cap”), and “Sacrifice Ka Parina” (where Titoo’s parents teach him how well he has it by going camping without basic necessities).
• Childish Tooth Gap: Titoo appear to be missing his left (right from the audience's perspective) front tooth.
• Christmas Episode: “Christmas Celebration”, where Ranga tries to disguise himself as Santa.
• Cursed with Awesome: In “Titoo ke Lambe Kaan”, a magician curses Titoo to have his ears swell to enormous sizes- which grants him Super-Hearing and lets him foil a plot to illegally evict everyone from his apartment building.
• "Double, Double" Title: One episode is called “Liar Liar”.
• Epunymous Title: “Titoo For Tat”, on a “tit-for-tat” response.
• Fathers Day Celebration Plot: The show has two of these; oddly, both are titled “Father’s Day”.
• Freeing the Genie: In “Ball Ka Jinn”, after Shera spends most of the episode abusing a magic ball that summons a genie who’s forced to obey whoever’s holding the ball, Titoo manages to grab the ball and free the genie by letting him hold his own ball.
• Gone Horribly Right:
  • In “Liar Liar”, Titoo’s parents convince him to swear to tell only the truth. The result: He’s honest even when it’s very, very inconvenient for them.
  • “Titoo Ke Tedhe Sawaal” has Titoo’s parents rewarding him for asking questions in an attempt to get him to like learning. The result: He becomes Constantly Curious to an obnoxious extent.
  • In “Titoo Ka Munvrat”, Titoo’s parents challenge him to go a day without talking. Cue an entire day of nonverbal miscommunications.
• Holiday Episode: The show has two that don’t fit under any subtropes- “The Holi Challenge” (for Holi) and “Kushiyon ki Diwali” (where Titoo learns the true meaning of Diwali).
• Hollywood Magnetism:
  • The magnetic shoes in “Super Shoe” seem to pick one metal object to pull their wearer towards and ignore all others.
  • All over the place in “Magnetic Titoo”, starting with Titoo somehow managing to magnetize his very non-metallic self.
• Hypnosis Can Do Anything: In “Titoo Hypnotist”, hypnotist Nainsukh is able to use his mesmerizing talents to pull off crimes.
• Identity Amnesia: In “Shera Ka Bat”, Shera is hit on the head in a game of cricket and loses all memories past the age of five, reverting to a baby-like personality.
• Incredible Shrinking Man: The two-parter “Mini Titoo” has Titoo and Golu being shrunk down after eating some strange chocolates.
• Inexplicably Identical Individuals: In “Titoo 2.0”, Shera manages to find a boy (named Tiko) who bears a bizarre resemblance to Titoo, and uses him to frame Titoo for various things.
• Invisible Main Character: The two-parter “Invisible Titoo”, naturally.
• Living Toys: In “Lakadi Ka Ghoda”, the Secretary acquires a rocking horse that comes to life at night and enjoys forcibly taking people on crazy rides; it eventually turns out that it used to be a magician’s assistant, who was cursed to be imprisoned in the horse for missing one too many performances; breaking the horse frees him and restores him to his normal form.
• Lost Wedding Ring: The plot of “Titoo Ke Mummy Ki Ring” has Titoo looking for his mother’s wedding ring; it ends up turning out to have been stuck in the sink.
• Mind-Control Eyes: Those hypnotized from Nainsukh in “Titoo Hypnotist” have their eyes turned into spirals.
• Mosquito Miscreants: In “Titoo Machhar”, an experimental chemical formula causes some mosquitos to become anthropomorphic and human-sized; they proceed to terrorize the town until Titoo manages to find a way to revert them to normal.
• Mother's Day Celebration Plot: One eleventh-season episode has one; its title is simply “Mother’s Day”.
• Motor Mouth: Tez, one of Titoo's classmates, has a bad case of this; the only way to slow him down is to tap on his shoulder.
• Mystery Episode: “Detective Titoo”, where Titoo investigates thefts around the city and discovers that the culprit is none other than the chef who was teaching the Secretary’s wife to make new dishes.
• Multi-Part Episode: The series gets an average of two to three two-parters per season, starting in the third; there’s also a single three-part episode, Ek Aur Ek Gyrah.
• Mutagenic Food: “Magical Fruits” has the residents of Titoo’s apartment building are turned into various fruits by eating fruit enchanted by a magician.
• Non-Human Head: In “Magical Wheel”, Shera gets his head turned into a clay flowerpot (with his face on it) in an accident with the titular magic potter’s wheel. [[spoiler:It goes back to normal at the end of the episode when the wheel is destroyed.
• Objectshifting: In “Magical Fruits”, Titoo and the other major characters are all turned into sentient fruits and have to accost a magician to turn them back to normal. No, really.
• One-Word Title: The episodes “Burger”, “Camping”, “Recycle”, “Andhvishwas”, “Germs”, “Skeleton”, “Smartphone”, “Bhukamp”, “Teamwork”, “Janmashtami”, and “Dusshera” all have one.
• Phantom-Zone Picture: “Titoo Ka Smart Camera” has thieves stealing houses using a high-tech camera that can capture whatever it takes a picture of.
• Playing Sick: “Bahana Expert Titoo” involves Titoo pretending to be ill in order to watch a new movie that’s premiering on a school day; however, it backfires badly when his parents become convinced that he’s deathly ill and send him to a hospital.
• Polly Wants a Microphone: In “Talking Parrot”, Titoo finds a surprisingly educated parrot named Mitthu.
• Pop-Culture Pun Episode Title: “Chhota Bhoot”, on fellow popular Indian cartoon Chhota Bheem.
• Powered Armor: In “Robo Suit”, various school robotics clubs- including the one at Titoo’s school- get into a competition making what is essentially this, for use in robo suit wrestling competitions.
• Protagonist Title: The series has one.
• Recycled Title: “Father’s Day” is the name of two episodes- one from the fourth season, and one from the eleventh.
• Rhyming Title: Displayed in the titles of “Sunday is Funday” and “Bubble Ka Trouble”.
• Saving the Orphanage: “Titoo Ka Annshann” has Titoo organizing a hunger strike to stop the local playground from being demolished.
• School Play: The focus of “The Show Must Go On”; Shera is trying to sabotage the play in a way that makes it seem Golu is a bad actor.
• "Scooby-Doo" Hoax: “Building Mein Bhoot” has Titoo perpetrating one in order to keep people away from an abandoned building where a stray cat has had kittens.
• Sentient Vehicle: Pappu the artificially-intelligent Cool Car from “Smart Car”.
• The Series Has Left Reality: The first two seasons feature realistic slice-of-life stories (“Titoo Bana Gubbara” and the first TV movie notwithstanding), but the third season brought in episodes with aliens and supertech; further seasons would feature more and more plots with either magic or technology that might as well be magic, to the extent that slice-of-life episodes became very rare.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: In “Future Se Aaya Mera Dost”, Gyan’s future self travels back to prevent a global catastrophe by stopping Gyan’s science experiment; however, Titoo ends up being blamed for the experiment going missing.
• Show Within a Show:
  • In “Mummy’s TV Time”, conflict arises when Titoo’s mother forces him to turn off his cartoons (mostly of the chase variety, and mostly parodies of popular cartoon shows) so she can watch her Soap Within a Show about two sisters, one rich and one poor.
  • In “Bahana Expert Titoo”, Titoo fakes sick so he can stay home and watch the new Crab Man TV movie.
• Sick Episode: “Papa Ki Neend”, although oddly Titoo’s father gets sick not from a contagious illness but from inhaling cleaning fumes.
• Single-Minded Twins: Rinki and Pinki, two girls who have the exact same bubbly personality.
• Striking Oil: Titoo discovers oil underneath the city in “Society Me Tel Ka Kuan”; chaos then ensues as everybody wants it.
• Supernatural Phone: Titoo finds a tablet with unnatural powers (specifically the ability to bring photo filters into reality) in “Titoo Aur Filters”.
• Time to Move: “Ghar Ki Shifting” has Titoo pulling off a Zany Scheme to stop his family from moving out of the apartment building.
• Title Theme Tune: Titoo’s name is shouted repeatedly during the theme song.
• Train Job: Two-parter “Titoo Express” has crooks attempting to rob a train that Titoo happens to be on; Titoo ends up stopping the thieves and preventing the train from colliding with another.
• Transflormation:
  • In “Tree King ka Free Problem”, a picnic goes away when the Tree King turns all the adults there into trees; it’s up to Titoo to figure out how to defeat him and turn them back.
  • In “Titoo ke Sar pe Ped”, the kids in Titoo’s class eat experimentally-modified mangoes that cause them to start turning into trees, although they’re fortunately able to find a way to reverse the transformation before it goes too far.
• Translator Collar: In “Animal Voice Converter”, Titoo discovers a small megaphone-like device that can translate animal sounds into human speech and vice versa; using it, he befriends a crow and foils an evil plot.
• Treasure Hunt Episode: “Treasure Hunt”, where Titoo brings his friends on a search for treasure in order to ensure their apartment building gets funds for repairs.
• Versus Title: Four episodes have one- “Titoo vs. Shark”, “Judo Karate Vs Kickboxing”, “Titoo vs Werewolf”, and “Titoo Vs Titoo”.
• Wedding Episode: In “Luka Chuppi Ka Khel”, Katrina asks for a day off so she can attend a friend’s wedding, but the Secretary refuses; a sympathetic Titoo comes up with a Zany Scheme to get the Secretary to let her attend.