Web Animation / Nigel and Marmalade

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He's Nigel the tiny wizard
Riding atop his dog/horse steed
He's Nigel the tiny wizard
He'll help anyone in need

— The first short

Nigel and Marmalade is a surreal animated comedy web series created by Tom Bates. It stars a small yellow wizard named Nigel and his dog/horse companion, Marmalade. They travel the land righting wrongs and helping those in need, but more often than not, the duo's heroism tends to carry adverse side effects.

The first short was uploaded on January 2nd, 2023. The series can be viewed on YouTube.

Spoilers are unmarked due to the episodes' short length

TROPES! TROPE BASTARDS!

• Absurdly Sharp Blade: The Frog King's sword cut smoothly through disobeying subjects in a single hand move — not even a strike — like if it was a hot knife through butter.
• Absurdly Spacious Sewer: The sewers beneath the municipality that our heroes live near are not only large enough for sightseeing boat rides through, but they contain an absolutely gargantuan cavern large enough for the local rat population to build their own bona fide metropolis inside of.
• Aerith and Bob: Names run the gamut from perfectly normal if a bit folksy (Nigel, Patricia, Kenneth) to the odd but acceptable (Marmalade, Sweetie, Nibbles) to the deliberately awful (Brap Neeflap, Cram Twatley, Krum Nipple).
• Affably Evil:
  • Patricia is not above crimes like murder and thievery, but she’s always happy to see Nigel and Marmalade and likes to share tea and snacks with them.
  • Whispering Benjamin speaks in an eloquent manner and is willing to drink milkshakes with Nigel, Marmalade, and the toad once he’s invited over, he also happens to be a skin eater who was waiting for someone to invite him so that he could eat the toad’s skin (though he’ll consider about doing so after finishing his milkshake).
• Alcohol-Induced Idiocy: Patricia convinces Nigel, who's already pretty drunk, to give their potions a little oomph to make them go crazy, in Marmalade's absence (he was gone to the bathroom). Nigel obliges by infusing the drink with insanity, causing it to bounce across the bar until it ends up being drunk by a witch, driving her crazy and causing her to threaten Nigel and Patricia. Entirely unconcerned about this, Patricia stabs her with a toothpick, causing the witch to explode into Ludicrous Gibs. As Marmalade returns to find the bar covered in gore and Nigel with the witch's face draped over him, he remarks they probably should give up drinking.
• And I Must Scream: Nigel and Marmalade sneak into an abandoned funfair, and find the clockwork puppet theater is still running, with a withered operator having performed five times daily for a century for absolutely no one. To comfort him, Nigel brings the only remaining standing seat to life so it can witness the puppet theater. As soon as they wander off, the seat realizes all other chairs are wrecked beyond repair, that it's bolted to the ground and that it is has been Forced to Watch a pointless puppet show for as long as Nigel's magic lasts. It proceeds to express its feelings with a scream of horror.
• And That's Terrible: Marmalade regularly has to point out to Patricia that a certain violent crime is something she shouldn't do.
• Animate Body Parts: In one short, Nigel and Marmalade have a customer for their potions who wants flesh-dissolving acid to kill his sentient right hand because he finds it annoying. Nigel frees the hand, which then declares its desire to go stabbing afterwards.
• Animate Inanimate Object: Many sentient objects are seen throughout the series, from apples to popcorn to tree stumps.
• Art-Style Clash: The titular duo are drawn in a much more simplistic style than the rest of the cast, with dot eyes and simple mouths while the one off characters are drawn with large, often bulging eyes and overly toothy mouths. It serves to make them look innocent and naive in the often grotesque and violent world they live in.
• Bad Boss: The hot air balloon taxi company doesn't allow its chauffeurs to leave their vehicles at any time or for any reason, even if they permanently stayed in it for 35 years.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Patricia always gets what she wants and never suffers repercussions.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: The series basically runs on this trope.
• Big Eater: The easiest way to distract Nigel from the consequences of the disaster du jour is to invoke food.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Nigel's drive is to help anyone in need and that means anyone. He'll help criminals who have been captured or arrested to escape and will open portals to help demons just as often as he'll help innocents and he'll help people even when it goes against his own goals. He's also not above causing trouble himself, stealing chocolate from flower people, attempting a cake heist or stealing a drunk wizard's fancy hat.
• Body Horror: Occasionally.
  • The first time he tries following the recipe from Cooking with Portals, Nigel gets both eyes swollen grotesquely by the winds dragging him into Hell.
  • When trying to save Trim Lipply, Nigel tries merging himself and Marmalade into a bird. He only succeeds in merging both into a bird-shaped lump of meat.
  • Again with Trim, when they visit a jazz club where he is performing, the patrons hate his act, despite him being genuinely talented... until Nigel gives him a grotesquely swollen tongue, just like the guy before him.
  • When confronting yet another criminal hobbit, who dearly wishes he was naturally green instead of having to paint himself, Nigel offers to make him permanently sick so he will always be green. It works, but as always with Nigel, it ends up being its own punishment.
• Bolivian Army Ending: “Nigel and Marmalade help with a sausage problem” ends with an army of living sausages approaching the sausage shack to take revenge, with the episode cutting out before they get to the shack.
• Bottomless Pits: The bottomless ice gorge in the deadly mountains, that people will occasionally try to cross on a stone bridge guarded by a troll, to go to the hamburger van parked on the other side. According to Marmalade, it's literally a bottomless pit.
• Bring My Brown Pants: In one short, Marmalade does this after noticing that the flesh table he and Nigel are riding is approaching a cliff. Never mind his apparent lack of pants.
  Marmalade: I'm currently wetting myself.
• Brits Love Tea: Patricia is easily the character who concentrates the most clichés about English people. And the most prominent is her love for a "lovely cuppa."
• The Bus Came Back: The King of Rat City, seen in one of the very first episodes, returned by the end of 2024 in Nigel and Marmalade: Rat City, and his city is finally fleshed out.
• The Caligula: The Duke, whose first appearance had him devour a sentient cake over its screams, with the implication that it's something he does daily. His second had him preside over a Blood Sport arena.
• Call-Back: In Nigel and Marmalade are helping a worm mayor summon a demon, the worm mayor complains that Worm Town is always getting squashed, and it cuts to the hairball creature from Nigel the Tiny Wizard and his dog/horse Marmalade must help with a hairball problem, which had run away at the end of that short, doing exactly that.
• Call to Adventure: Trim Lipply feels it and keeps trying to go on one. Pity he is comically underprepared for even the simplest of tasks.
• Card-Carrying Villain: Patricia makes no bones about the fact she's a villain. When Marmalade tries to stop her latest theft by pointing stealing is wrong, she responds with "Fun though, isn't it?"
• Cartoon Creature: It's hard to say what Patricia is meant to be. In the series itself she's only ever referred to as a psychotic pink blob.
• Cast of Snowflakes: Other than Nigel and Marmalade, there are very few recurring characters (the host of Cooking with Portals, Gareth, Patricia and Trim Lipply) and those that appear are impressively varied. Talking Birds and Criminal Hobbits are recurring archetypes but even they all have different designs.
• Cerebus Retcon: In a rare case of the reappearance of someone who isn't one of the 5 characters mentioned above, the Toad Nigel and Marmalade helped by building him fortifications around his pond. He didn't want it just because he was the guardian of the pond, and didn't shoot anyone coming close to his position on sight because he was a little too trigger happy. As the 2024 Halloween Episode showed (see the Halloween episode entry below), Toad was Properly Paranoid, and fences are one of the very few things preventing Whispering Benjamin from eating his skin.
• Continuity Nod: When Nigel and Marmalade meet a "Flesh-Tube", they initially mistaken it for a Flesh-Disc, like one encountered in an episode a few weeks earlier.
• Curse Cut Short: In one short, where Nigel and Marmalade help a sentient apple get revenge on the horse that tried to eat it, the apple does this when it realizes it's about to be eaten by said horse.
  Apple: Oh, fu— [CHOMP]
  • Done by the mayor of Flower Town upon seeing it being flooded with vomit by the hobbit he had just expressed relief would never damage his town again.
    Mayor: Fuuuu-![roll credits]
• Death Before Dishonor: Jock Mandible preferred to fall to his death because his famous muscles weren't strong enough to save him from a literal cliffhanging situation, than accept the magical help from Nigel. The reason behind his choice is that his dad taught him the power of muscles was enough to get out from any situation, and his last words during the fall were "Are you proud of me now, daddyyyyyy?!", strongly hinting it was more a question of unresolved daddy issues than an actual matter of honour.
• Disney Creatures of the Farce: As Log Boy floats down the river singing, a bird and a beaver come along to join in his song by playing his hard body as an instrument. All serves to make his fate upon crossing Nigel and Marmalade all the more jarring.
• Disproportionate Retribution:
  • A short revolved around a hobbit who was pilloried, literally, for the horrible crime of rubbing its greasy forehead on a shop's windows.
  • After Kevin the Demonic Fox's latest mischief of distressing an elderly woman with a tentacle in a Pringles tube earns him a thumping, the woman's son exhorts Nigel and Marmalade to help her beat him to death.
  • Graham attempts to choke a pelican to death simply for having a bigger mouth than him.
  • While Patricia does call Tony Mushroom an evil bastard for taking Nigel hostage, what drives her to kill him is him insulting chocolate.
• The Dividual: Both Nigel and Marmalade are always seen together, never going solo.
• Double Entendre: The Chocolate Adrenaline Balls packet loudly screams, "EAT MY BALLS!"
• Dull Surprise: Marmalade's face is always in a neutral expression.
• Dungeon Shop: Nigel and Marmalade meet Kormrank the Fleshripper, who guards the Chamber of Endless Riches, while searching for ice cream. Upon explaining what they were looking for, the massive guardian points to the other end of the hall... showing a normal ice cream shop.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • Nigel used to agonize a bit over the Body Horror disasters he caused and wasn't a fan of violent movies. He's become pretty desensitized to the blood and violence since.
  • Marmalade's initial voice was very deep and posh sounding before settling in a loud monotone. His nose and mouth were also noticeably larger, and his legs were thicker. Nigel's voice was a bunch of high-pitched squeaking random sounds, and while it has remained high-pitched, at least it's now possible to more or less work out the actual words he's using when he talks.
• Edible Bludgeon: Played with and deconstructed. Patricia has a large collection of chocolate weapons (so she can Eat the Evidence once she's done with them), and tries to use a chocolate knife to kill a mushroom that tried to steal one of her recipes. Nigel releases the mushroom instead... and it proceeds to grab the chocolate weapon and hold it to Nigel's throat so he can steal the recipe and escape. Unfortunately for it, Nigel is warm enough that a few seconds of pressing the chocolate blade to his throat end up melting the edge into uselessness, giving Patricia the opportunity to finish it off.
• Emergency Transformation: One of Nigel's specialties. It would probably work better if he were capable of reversing or even lessening it, given he tends to heavily overshoot whatever change he was going for.
• Eloquent in My Native Tongue: A variation. Nigel and Marmalade meet a fisherman, who's annoyed the maggots he uses as bait are squeaking and by Marmalade's suggestion they're trying to say something. Nigel increases their size to make them more intelligible, and it turns out the maggot that was not speared into the fishing rod's hook is singing, mourning the death of his brother. Marmalade then opines that since now they know maggots are sentient and capable of expressing emotion, they should all stop using them as bait. The fisherman snorts at the idea and throws the hook with the dying maggot into the water.
• Evil Tastes Good: The host of Cooking with Portals apparently believes so, since his recipes seem to be based on opening portals to Hell and allowing the heat to cook the food.
• Eye Scream: Nigel and Marmalade accidentally get fishing hooks lodged into a talking log's eyes, and Nigel's attempts to get them out quickly make things worse.
• False Reassurance: Just as Nigel freaks out after maiming or killing the person they wanted to help, Marmalade nonchalantly tells him not to worry, framing the situation in a way it doesn't quite look as terrible.
  Marmalade: Don't worry, Nigel.
• Feathered Fiend: Downplayed; every bird is a Jerkass with teeth, eager to laugh at other's misery and call them bastards. This is a Running Gag across the series. The Vulture pecking a zombie and unfortunate pelican strangled by Graham are exceptions.
• Fishing for Sole: When they go fishing in a pond, Nigel catches a tyre and Marmalade an arm, which were being used by the Inventor Fish for his contraption in order to get out.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: Well, since every episode lasts one minute or less, each occurrence of foreshadowing technically counts. However one is particularly distinguishable: when Nigel and Marmalade help Kevin the fox out of a trap, he gladly goes away without thanking them. Usually, when they help someone and this person is happy, they thank them. Immediately after, the villager who set the trap comes back and reveals that Kevin is actually a demonic fox, and a jerk.
• Foil: Nigel is unintelligible to the audience, but exhibits emotion, whilst Marmalade is intelligible but has a perpetual neutral expression.
• Formula-Breaking Episode:
  • Usually, besides some cameos of previous characters and Continuity Nod, each episode is disconnected from the others. However, the episode published on the 19th of March 2024 starts with Nigel and Marmalade being locked in a dungeon, a direct consequence of stealing a wizard's hat in the previous episode published earlier that month.
  • All episodes are less than 2 minutes long, most of them are even less than 1 minute. All but Nigel and Marmalade: Rat City, who is 11 minutes and 11 seconds long.
• Gentleman Thief: Played with Patricia, who's a shameless thief and fancier of the finer things, but is far more willing to kill than other examples of this trope, even after she gets what she wanted.
• Go Mad from the Isolation: Qwimble Norris, a flesh disk, gets trapped in the well that serves as the only entrance or exit of the town's hottest nightclub. Nigel gives him a push further down, finally letting him enter the club... which is full of corpses. It turns out he was stuck in there, by his own estimation, for five or six decades, trapping everyone inside. When he keeps chumming up with the dead patrons, Nigel asks Marmalade if Qwimble has gone insane. Marmalade confirms it.
• Gonk: About 60% of the other characters that appear are mostly unappealing appearance-wise, with most of them having crooked teeth and long, crooked noses along with some others having their eyes elongated and drooping out of their sockets.
• Halloween Episode: The short published on 22nd of October of 2024. It features Whispering Benjamin, a somewhat spooky child-looking man, who floats above the ground and stares fixedly from afar at people whose skin he'd like to eat. Even in-universe he is considered as creepy and being stared by him for too long can turn someone into a nervous wreck. The title of the episode is even Nigel and Marmalade meet a Spooky Boy.
• Hero of Another Story:
  • One of the very first episodes introduced Blob Squatley, a blob who wanted to become a TV star, so he paid a bird to fly him to a television studio. But he was dropped on Nigel and Marmalade's roof and stayed stuck here during 4 years and a half. Even if it is his only occurrence where he acts and talks, he later made several quick silent cameos on TV or on billboards through the show, implying he is achieving his dream.
  • Parodied with "legendary hero, Jock Mandible".
• Hero with an F in Good: Nigel. Whenever someone gives him a request, he does his absolute best to fulfil it. Unfortunately, his inability to think about the consequences of the wish leads to exaggerated forms of the wish in ways that invariably backfire on the wisher. To be fair to Nigel, though, a good amount of the wishers don't think about said consequences either. Some others don't follow the instructions while Nigel is casting a spell on them, who would have been otherwise successful.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • A rare heroic case with Nigel. He is well-intentioned and tries to use his powers for good. But it usually ends up poorly for the people he tries to help. And yes, that includes him when, for some reason, he casts his own spell on himself or on his house. Repeatedly.
  • A more traditional villain case with the Prank Wizard. He uses a magic balloon to prank Marmalade and sends him into the sky, not caring about the danger of the situation. So, in return, in one of the few occurrences where Nigel actually does magic exactly how he wants, he turns the Prank Wizard into a balloon himself to go save Marmalade, and that also came with the side effect of the Prank Wizard exploding.
• Ignored Epiphany: Nobody ever listens to Marmalade's advice to take some time to deal with their problems and work out what they really want, instead immediately demanding Nigel use his magic to provide a quick fix. Long story short, even if Nigel has the best intentions, this never works.
• Instantly Proven Wrong: At one point, Nigel grants a hair-eating fairy an endlessly regenerating mustache it can gorge on without eating others' hair. This instantly gives it a steadily growing Balloon Belly, until Nigel asks if the fairy will be OK. Just as soon as Marmalade assures him those fairies can easily handle eating massive amounts of hair, it blows up.
• Intelligible Unintelligible: Nigel speaks in a strange squeaky voice which the audience can only understand by reading the subtitles, but the other characters understand him just fine.
• Internal Homage: "Rat City" recreates the Theme Song, with a short scene of Nigel riding on top of Marmalade as they go to buy a Mega Chocsplosion bar.
• Jerkass: Many of the birds in the setting are depicted as bullies who enjoy mocking others.
• Karma Houdini: Patricia always gets away with her misdeeds, which include murder (attempted and successful), kidnapping, torture, and armed robbery. She also always keeps what she steals.
• Lack of Empathy: A gnome baker would not share his recipe for fondant fancies with Patricia, so she proceeded to tie him up and beat the recipe out of him. When called out on it, she nonchalantly asks what else she was supposed to do.
• A Lighter Shade of Black: Patricia, for all her wanton villainy, turns out to be the lesser evil than her prisoner, Tony Mushroom. In short order, he tricks Nigel into letting him go before holding him hostage for Patricia's recipe, states his intentions to burn her baking empire to the ground and finishes by attempting to kill Nigel out of spite.
• Liquid Assets: In one episode, a goblin woman requests Nigel's help with her boyfriend, who has his hunkiness sucked by a Jam Jar of Insanity, reducing him to a shrivelled wreck. Nigel opens the Jar and confirms it's in there, but pulling it out too early accidentally infuses it into the nearby Nutella jar, creating an animated, musclebound entity. The girlfriend ends up running away with the Nutella.
• MacGuffin Guardian:
  • Martin the Destroyer, a tiny swordsman guarding a gigantic emerald in a desert temple. Patricia sneaks around and grabs the gem while he's still making his introductory speech, at which point he immediately gives up and starts berating himself as a useless failure.
  • Kormrank the Fleshripper. He's a gigantic hairy goblinoid who works in a dungeon, where he guards the door to the Chamber of Endless Riches. Whenever some adventurer shows up to challenge him, he splits their skull with a single casual stab of his claw-tipped finger, but he doesn't enjoy it very much. If you're in the dungeon for some other reason (e.g. looking for ice cream), he'll happily leave you alone, and he's really quite chatty and friendly.
• Magical Incantation: Nigel learned one such chant from a cooking channel, mruk tah maggh, that opens portals to the Underworld. He uses it mostly as a substitute for an oven.
• Master of None: Nigel can do anything with his magic, but it often backfires horribly. The only consistent magic Nigel can do on people without harming anyone is muscle magic (such as using it on Clump and the cockney Hobbit that rubbed his face on a window) and Telekinesis.
• Mike Nelson, Destroyer of Worlds: Almost every episode of the series has Nigel and Marmalade ultimately doing more harm than good in an attempt to help someone in need. For example, in this short, Nigel gives a sentient tree stump feet so it can escape a goblin that plans to destroy it, but the stump turns out to be evil. And in this one, Nigel makes a bog witch's head smooth so she'll stop rubbing everyone else's heads out of jealousy, but he ends up accidentally removing part of her brain in the process and the witch continues rubbing their heads anyway. The list goes on.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: Possibly. Marmalade is described as a "dog/horse", but it's unclear whether that means he's part dog and part horse, or that he is either a dog or a horse and it's unclear as to which.
• Mr. Alt Disney: Slopton Meatly, AKA Uncle Slop, of Meatlyworld, the Most Joyous Place in the World.
• Mundane Utility: "Cooking With Portals" involves using portals to the underworld to bake food as if they were ovens.
• Must Be Invited: Whispering Benjamin can enter a private area only if he is invited. Considering that he eats other people's skin, it is better to not invite him, or at least to have a sufficiently filling milkshake to give him instead.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!: Proving they don't need Nigel's magic to do this, Nigel and Marmalade try to defuse a duel between Patricia and a cowboy by talking with him and giving him a pep talk. They succeed... just in time for Patricia to work out how her gun works and headshot the cowboy.
• Non-Standard Character Design:
  • The titular duo stand out in contrast to the supporting cast by having very simple doodle-ish designs with simple mouths that never show their teeth. The rest of the cast has large and often grotesque teeth.
  • Compared to the other… unique looking people the duo help, the fisherman looks ugly in a cartoonish way rather than the normally grotesquely deformed appearances most characters have.
  • The Death Scream Mushroom in contrast to it's name, is shown in a very simple and cute style with little dot eyes and no teeth.
• Not Hyperbole: In Rat City, Marmalade makes a statement that sounds like sarcastic hyberbole, but is actually a dry factual summary of the situation they're in.
  Marmalade: I guess we'll keep going at the speed of a fly blowing into a drinking straw.
• OOC Is Serious Business: Subverted for laughs. Marmalade never has any emotion in his voice even when witnessing or being made part of the horrors he and Nigel come across or cause on a regular basis. The one time he does audibly emote is a disgusted "Eugh!" at the sight of Nigel's scraggly messy "beard."
• Only the Leads Get a Happy Ending: "Rat City" ends with Nigel and Marmalade thanking Plomble for his help and happily eating their Mega Chocsplosion bar, oblivious to the fact that Plomble gets hit by a truck seconds after he leaves.
• Our Goblins Are Different: Goblins and hobgoblins are some of the most common denizens of the land Nigel and Marmalade inhabit. While they have generic physical characteristic as many other portrayals of goblins— pointed ears, long noses (granted most characters have these), and green skin, they come in various shapes and sizes, and are most notable for being more-or-less identical to humans in terms of behavior, though apparently some do live in caves.
• Our Zombies Are Different: Besides the fact he is rotting and attracts vultures, the Undead Cyclist still behaves as a normal human being. It is implied that he isn't a unique case.
• Pit Trap: Patricia keeps one just outside her cottage under the picnic blanket as a final trap to steal a gnome baker's recipes.
• Poke the Poodle: Many of the antagonists that Nigel and Marmalade encounter have that trait, such as a cockney hobbit committing crimes in a convenience store; said crimes included slapping the crisps and throwing slices of ham at an old woman, which Marmalade lampshades.
• Punch-Clock Villain: Kormrank the Fleshripper casually kills anyone who tries to go to the chamber door he’s guarding, but he’s only doing it as a part of his shift and is a rather friendly fellow to those who aren’t coming for the door.
• Rank Scales with Asskicking: Frogs subject to the Frog King are too scared to disobey him or even make reasonable remarks about his orders (like it is easier to go around a house instead of going through it). And when someone does it anyway, the Frog King effortlessly and smoothly cuts through them with his sword. After witnessing the Frog King murdering his own herald this way, even Nigel and Marmalade themselves are too afraid of him to not let him pass through their house.
• A Rare Sentence: Throughout the series, the situations are so bizarre that everything the people say about them sounds like cobbled-up nonsense.
• Reckless Gun Usage:
  • Trim Lipply, a tiny blue person, starts an adventure by firing "the Adventurer's Pistol" into the air. This kills a bird, and her irate husband swoops down to fling Trim from above. When saved by Nigel and Marmalade, Trim celebrates the end of his adventure by firing the Adventurer's Pistol into the air again. This kills the other bird.
  • Patricia enters a duel with the cowboy she insulted by flicking his bulbous Adam's apple. She is unfamiliar with the gun, but as the cowboy gets distracted by talking with Nigel and Marmalade, Patricia works out how to fire it and ventilates the cowboy's head. To be fair, the cowboy did manage to shoot once but missed.
• Sapient Eat Sapient: Apparently, sentience is a powerful help to better the taste of something.
  • Colonel Kernel's popcorn is the most delicious in the world, precisely because it is sentient.
  • This gets deconstructed by the sausages from the Sausage Shack, which get taken away from the sausage delivery truck by a Sack because they're sapient and are brought to the Sausage King to form an army. Said sausages rally against the Shack, and the person running the stand says they don't like being eaten and that the one in the advert was "a paid sausage actor."
  • The Duke eats the most delicious cakes in the world on a daily basis, and it absolutely doesn't bother him to eat a sentient cake able to talk. Nigel and Marmalade neither, but they stopped when they realized that cutting the cake hurt it badly.
• Sapient Steed: Nigel rides on Marmalade's back as Marmalade's a dog/horse, and Marmalade can talk to anybody.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: The events of Rat City. After making Plomble the fly brave his traumatic fears by helping them find the titular city and destroying a huge chunk of the city, as well as massacring many of the inhabitants with their holy wood chipper, all in service of retrieving the last Mega Chocsplosion bar in town, Nigel bestows on their new friend his promised mighty wings. Plomble, overjoyed, wishes his new friends well and flies off to seek adventure with his newfound capabilities and confidence in himself, while Nigel and Marmalade tuck in to their chocolatey prize. Plomble is almost immediately killed by a truck delivering a fresh batch of Mega Chocsplosion bars, rendering the entire endeavor moot.
• Shout-Out:
  • The Bird Sorceror has Tim the Enchanter's beard and headgear.
  • One of the recurring races is Hobbits.
• Simple Solution Won't Work: When Nigel accidentally turns himself old, Marmalade convinces him to try simply undoing the spell, but at the same time admits that it probably won't work because Nigel's generally terrible at undoing his magic. Nigel's attempt somehow turns him into a giant foot instead.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: Just about everyone, barring the titular duo, has really colourful vocabulary.
• Small Name, Big Ego: Graham, who's famous for having the biggest mouth, feels he has to strangle a pelican to death to protect his "title", feeling he can't compete.
• Snap Back: In spite of Nigel's dismal track record with undoing spells, any magical changes done to Nigel, Marmalade or Patricia will be undone by their next apperance. The one off characters are not so fortunate.
• Sudden Anatomy: Played for Laughs. Whenever a character begins screaming or shouting, their face usually becomes more detailed and realistic.
• Super-Strength: Muscle magic, when it's done right, can buff a person in seconds.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • Almost systematically, such as Nigel creating a barricade with no door around a lake for a guardian frog and the latter's mate comes back for shopping and has no way to get in.
  • This also happens sometimes even without Nigel's intervention. Colonel Kernel's emporium has had no other clients than Nigel and Marmalade for several years because it is located at the top of a mountain, Trim Lipply shoots two birds dead because he doesn't aim before firing his gun, despite Marmalade trying to avoid this, the evil tree stump and Kevin the demonic fox have villagers actively trying to trap and kill them for being dangerous jerks, or the beaver with flaccid teeth, which he considers his "secret shame", accidentally divulgating it to a bird, a sentient tree and Nigel and Marmalade, because he is singing about it out loud.
  • Because of the knife he was using being made out of chocolate, Tony Mushroom’s attempt to kill Nigel ends up failing due to the knife eventually melting, rendering it dull and unable to actually cut anything.
• Sweet Tooth: Nigel loves chocolate, sweets and cakes to the point the otherwise good and helpful tiny wizard will resort to theft to get his tiny hands on more.
• Talking Animal: Marmalade is a talking dog/horse. Talking birds are also regularly seen in the series, and often have potty mouths. Some other animals can speak too.
• Tempting Fate: Happens to Log Boy as he floats down a river towards the main characters.
  Log Boy: Oh, what a glorious day to be a log. Nothing could go wrong toda-(gets his eyes caught in Nigel and Marmalade's fishing hooks)-aaargh-ha-ha-hay!
• That Makes Me Feel Angry: Marmalade's face and voice are both completely neutral 24/7, so when he has to express an emotion, he plainly states how he's feeling. One time, he said that he was in a panic attack in that tone when a prank witch pranked him with a balloon.
• Tim Taylor Technology: The Inventor Fish wants to leave his pond in a water-powered contraption, but Nigel and Marmalade accidentally tear out key components, so Nigel uses his magic to boost the device. In fact, he overpowers it to the point that both it and its builder rocket off into the horizon, where they detonate in a blast.
• 'Tis Only a Bullet in the Brain: During a walk in the swamp, the duo meets with Cram Twattley, a coffee house owner whose business is now frequented by a witch who compulsively rubs his and his customers' smooth heads. Nigel apprehends the witch and Marmalade asks why she is doing it, to which she responds by showing her own bumpy head and saying she wishes her own head was smooth like theirs. Nigel uses his magic to rip out the bumps and smooth over her skull... just in time for Marmalade to realize Nigel just tore out a chunk of her brain, leaving her semi-amnesiac and still compulsively rubbing others' smooth heads.
• Tom the Dark Lord: One of the beings that Nigel's able to help turns out to be Christopher: God of Diseases.
• Too Dumb to Live: A criminal hobbit desperately calls the duo's hotline to let them know that he's kidnapped someone and confessed every detail about his life to his victim. Nigel suggests jiggling a bit with the victim's brain with his magic via the phone to erase any knowledge of what the hobbit just told him, and instructs him to carefully place the handset at the victim's forehead. However, just as Nigel starts casting, the hobbit puts it to his ear, requesting additional explanations... just in time for the magic to hit him and push a tiny bit of his brain out of his head, killing him instantly.
• Toothy Bird: Played for laughs with all birds having unsettling human teeth the full length of their beaks.
• Toxic Friend Influence: Patricia convinces Nigel to steal a hat from a wizard, which gets Nigel and Marmalade caught in the hat's anti-theft device leading to the two getting prosecuted under hat law.
• Trademark Favorite Food:
  • Nigel is particularly fond of popcorn to the point that he's excited about going to a popcorn festival and travels with Marmalade up a mountain to get to a popcorn store near the peak.
  • Marmalade is fond of chocolate, and when he falls into a vat of chocolate, he says that he loves it.
  • Patricia always appears to drink tea or is planning to. She is also quite fond of fondant fancies.
• [Trope Name]: Combined with Saying Sound Effects Out Loud. In one instance, the sausage shack owner says, "Boo hoo! Sad noises!" when they don't have the sentient sausages for their business. Another incidence is when Marmalade sleeps and says, "Snore. Sleeping noises".
• True Beauty Is on the Inside: Inverted - after Patricia gets turned into an adorable plushy, she laments that people will no longer fear her. Marmalade has to explain to her that people's fear of her was never due to her appearance, and it was her murderous actions that made her so widely feared.
• Trumplica: One such character appears to sell the interior of the titular duo's TV as real estate to a tiny person. When he's confronted, he beats feet.
• Unintentional Backup Plan: After Nigel and Marmalade get trapped in the head of the Forehead Wizard, Marmalade finds that the empathy lobe on the Wizard's brain is all shrivelled, and gets Nigel to inflate it so that the Wizard will regain his empathy and release them. Nigel ends up inflating it so much that the Wizard's head bursts open, which Marmalade admits is not what he meant.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Nigel and Marmalade don't always realize the harm they cause. In the way to Rat City, they blow a sewage hatch to open a path, and the ejected metal squashes a peacefully fishing rat.
  • The rat who steals the Mega Chocsplosion bar from Sweetie McSweet is ultimately the reason why Nigel and Marmalade seek out Rat City, interrupt their public execution ceremony, destroy a huge portion of the city, mutilate their king and shred a sizeable number of their fellow citizens in a wood chipper.
• Viewers Like You: Parodied in the Rat City episode. There is a brief cut in the middle where the camera shifts to Patricia enjoying a spot of tea, and she reminds the viewers that Nigel and Marmalade is entirely funded by people like them. She then proceeds to pull a revolver, aim it at the screen and blandly invite the viewer to support the series. No pressure.
• Vomiting Cop: After Nigel and Marmalade accidentally hook a sentient log's eyes on fishing hooks and pull them up, things get worse for them when a police log, complete with an old bobby's helmet comes up on them and vomits at the sight.
• We Help the Helpless: Parodied, as Nigel's magic often puts anyone he helps into a significantly worse situation.
• Weaksauce Weakness: The only thing that prevents Whispering Benjamin from eating someone’s skin is that he won’t do so until he’s invited into his victim’s residence, a rule he even remarks as being a bit silly.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: A fisherman gets annoyed his bait keeps making squeaky noises. Nigel enlarges the two maggots he's using so they can understand their squeaks better despite the fisherman insisting that maggots don't have enough brain capacity to express any feelings. It turns out the maggot not inserted into the hook is singing a mournful song for his dying brother, lamenting how he'll never get to fly. Marmalade then comments that since now they know maggots are sentient and have feelings, they should probably stop using them as bait. The fisherman begs to differ.
• Wins by Doing Absolutely Nothing: Usually Patricia kills anyone who gets in her way, however when the owner of a sugar mine catches her trying to steal a block of sugar, he ends up getting himself killed by threatening her so loudly that he dislodges a giant block of sugar in the cave ceiling above, which falls and crushes him flat.
• You Dirty Rat!: The rats of Nigel and Marmalade are at once civilized enough to have a sprawling sewer city and a monarchy and highly savage, building their society off needlessly brutal sacrifices and feasting on the flesh of their enemies, or even any poor sap mistaken for their god.