Western Animation / Haunted Tales for Wicked Kids

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Haunted Tales for Wicked Kids, better known as Historietas Assombradas (Para Crianças Malcriadas) or just Historietas Assombradas in Portuguese, and Cuentos espantosos para niños caprichosos in Spanish, is a Brazilian animated Horror Comedy series created by Victor-Hugo Borges and co-produced by Glaz Entretenimento and Copa Studio for Cartoon Network Brazil. It was inspired by two stop-motion short film with the same name, also created by Victor-Hugo Borges.

The show follows the adventures of Pepe, a mischievous 11-year-old boy who lives with his witch grandmother Vó in an eccentric town. Along with his friends Marilu, a Little Miss Badass, The Big Guy Roberto and the sweet-and-spicy Conjoined Twins Guto and Gastón, they deal with various entities and supernatural threats, usually caused by Pepe's antics.

It premiered for the first time on Brazilian TV on March 4, 2013 and its second season premiered on June 1, 2015. The Movie of the series of the same name premiered on November 2, 2017.

The English dub was provided by Canadian studio 9 Story Media Group, and this dub was actually aired on Disney Channel Asia. Yes, Disney Channel aired a Cartoon Network show (in Southeast Asia only, but still).

It's possible to find all the episodes and the movie in Portuguese and Spanish on YouTube, as well as some episodes with English subtitles. The English dub can be found online.

Similar to The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy and Courage the Cowardly Dog, this cartoon is known for its dark and traumatizing scenes for children.

This series has no relation to Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids.

Haunted Tales For Wicked Kids provides examples of:

• The Ace: Marilu. She can fight, speak twelve monstrous dialects, knit, play the violin and much more.
• Afraid of Clowns: Vó used to be afraid of clowns until the end of "Trem da Alegria".
• All for Nothing: In "Pepe e Marilu na Convenção dos Monstros", Marilu is at a monstrous conference as a translator and suspects that Doctor Frunken Schtein (an obvious reference to Frankenstein) plans to use children's brains to end the monstrous food crisis. Turns out she mistranslated a word that means "brain" and "nose booger".
• All Witches Have Cats: Vó is a witch who has an entire army of cats at her disposal, usually as assistants or butlers.
• Amazing Technicolor Population: There are many characters with skin tones that vary from normal to shades such as pink, purple, blue, green and yellow.
• Ambiguously Human: Vó appears to be a normal old lady, but in addition to her work as a magic potion maker, it is revealed that her parents are immortal, in addition to being the older sister of the female personification of death herself. The film also implies that she is made of magic. This also applies to Pepe, who has pointy elf ears.
• Anti-Role Model: Although he has his good side, Pepe lives up to the show's name by being selfish, stupid, petty and lazy (even in his job as Vó's delivery boy).
• Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: Pepe is very prone to distractions, especially visible in "O Fim do Mundo" and "Macaco do Enigma".
• Badass Adorable: Marilu has an adorable face, but is very skilled at fighting.
• Balloon Belly: Pepe gains a pot belly when he eats too much, emphasizing his status as a Big Eater.
• Body Horror: A few exemples:
  • In "O Túnel do Amor", Mário's face melts like a candle.
  • In "A Loira do Banheiro", Marilu says her face hurts from a potion and it quickly starts to bubble and melt.
  • In "Múmia do Amor", Tutankhamun's very realistic heart literally breaks and then himself shatters into a million pieces.
  • In "Quem Tem Curativo, Tem Medo" when Mário warns Pepe why he shouldn't take off his bandage quickly, he tells the story of a knight (played by Mário himself) who was skinned alive, revealing his red muscles.
• Cast of Snowflakes: All characters have a completely unique design.
• Conjoined Twins: Guto and Gastón are conjoined twins with different personalities and nationalities. Guto is Brazilian and Gastón is French, for some reason. Both are separated in the movie.
• Creepy Cemetery: The city where the series takes place has a sinister and gloomy cemetery that features prominently in the episodes "O Fim do Mundo" (where the ancient monster, Bhutumu, is awakened) and "Assim Falou Zaratristhe" (where the children encounter a very intelligent zombie named D. Funto). And in the episode "Como Pepe Arruinou o Natal", there is also a creepy animal cemetery capable of bringing the dead back to life if buried there.
• Crossover Cameo: Mixed with Company Cross-References and Crossover Punchline. In "Trem da Alegria", when the hole in the nose of the evil clown Fin Fón is sucking everything around it in, there is a brief cameo by Gajah, the elephant protagonist of "Trunk Train'' (another cartoon produced by Copa Studio).
• A Day in the Limelight: Roberto gets one in "O Pêlo que Habito", Ramírez gets one in "Faroeste Cachorro" and even Bardo in "Bardo: Do Anonimato à Fama".
• Deadpan Snarker: Gastón makes a lots of sarcastic comments, usually toward to Pepe.
• Deal with the Devil: In the episode "Pobre Diabo" Pepe, Vó, Guto and Gastón sell their souls for a Pokémon-themed video game, while Devil collects them along with other souls to buy an air conditioner for himself.
• Detention Episode: "Detenção de la Detención", as the title indicates, is an episode where Pepe and his friends end up in school detention (at the behest of Mário, who was serving as an honorary teacher) after making a mess in class. However, their detention room is nothing like a normal detention room, as it's a dungeon beneath the school. After being unjustly accused of making noise there, a trapdoor opens and they fall into the school's underground caverns, where they encounter the Detentor, who introduces himself as a warden who forces them to undergo deadly tests to compel them to learn the school curriculum, threatening their lives and punishing their unruly behavior.
• Ms. Fanservice: Morte (or Lady Darkness in English) and A Loira do Banheiro (Bathroom Beauty in English) are this because of their physically attractive designs.
• "Fantastic Voyage" Plot: In "Os Pepenautas do Caribe", Pepe drinks expired yogurt, causing a deadly fungus to lodge in his stomach, which will soon kill him. This forces Vó, Marilu, Guto, and Gastón to drink shrinking potions and use the Marilu's ship in a bottle to enter his body and kill the fungus. Because they are navigating Pepe's stomach acid with a miniature ship, this episode also mixes tropes of a maritime adventure.
• "Flowers for Algernon" Syndrome: In "Assim Falou Zaratristhe", D. Funto (a very intelligent but very sad and unhappy zombie) makes a deal with Pepe to exchange his genius brain for the boy's tiny brain, believing that this will finally give him the key to happiness, which is ignorance. After Pepe accepts, he temporarily becomes a depressed genius, instead of being the typical Book Dumb.
• Freeze-Frame Introduction: A striking feature of the series is that every time an antagonist debuts in an episode, the camera shows their appearance with a green background surrounded by purple, their scientific name in Latin and next to a video game-like Status Line showing some characteristic of them in the form of a bar, much like a trading card.
• The Great Wall: In "Além da Muralha", it is shown that there is a wall separating the city from a much more enchanting and beautiful land inhabited by cute, colorful, and round little creatures. Crossing the wall is the most forbidden thing in the city, but the boys go to the other side to save Marilu, who ended up on the other side after Pepe recklessly played with her toy helicopter and she tried to retrieve it with her hands.
• The Grim Reaper: Morte (whose name is literally the word "death" in Portuguese) is introduced as the show's reaper, who has the appearance of a very attractive redhead motorcyclist and makes her debut in the episode "O Globo da Morte... da Morte" to compete with Vó in her globe of death in an attempt to win and take her soul. She is also dyslexic and has a frequent habit of confusing words and sayings. At the end of the episode, it is revealed that she is Vó's younger sister.
• Letterbox: "Faroeste Cachorro" stands out for being the only episode to alternate between this and the show's standard aspect ratio, as well as having a sepia filter to reference and simulate the Spaghetti Western genre. It also joins the Eyedscreen trope, as the characteristic black bars tend to thicken during some dramatic or tense scene between Ramírez and Boogeyman.
• Monster Mash: Naturally, being a show about a boy who encounters all sorts of supernatural creatures in and around his city in each episode, most of the antagonists (or just secondary characters) are classic monsters from popular culture (or at least inspired by them), such as ghosts/spirits ("Smells Like Teen Spirit", "Kumo Tatchi"), zombies ("Assim Falou Zaratristhe", "Como Pepe Arruinou o Natal"), a mummy ("Múmia do Amor"), a variant of werewolf known as a werepigeon ("O Pombisomem"), and the Devil ("Pobre Diabo"). There are also monsters of the Our Cryptids Are More Mysterious type, such as Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster ("O Pombisomem") and Chupacabra ("A Culpa é Sempre do Mordomo"). Another monster, like Cupid ("O Túnel do Amor"), for example, is a monster inspired by the winged god of love. The episode "Pepe e Marilu na Convenção dos Monstros", in particular, shows a convention held among monsters where several of them gather to listen to and discuss the problems of the monster community, introducing Dr. Frunken Schtein, inspired by Frankenstein's Monster.
• Never Say "Die": Averted; The show takes the liberty of saying the words "death" and "dying" naturally, especially considering the show's darker tone. The fact that there's a character named Morte makes that clear enough.
  • In "O Globo da Morte... da Morte", Guto asks directly if Pepe is dead.
• No Name Given: Strangely, despite Pepe's grandmother being one of the main characters on the show, nobody refers to her by her real name. She's only called "Vó", which is the Portuguese word for grandma.
• Old School Building: A variant of the "old castle building" type. Episodes set in the school, such as "O Antagonista", "A Tirania de Tchitchero", "A Culpa é Sempre do Mordomo", "Detenção de la Detención", and "A Lancheira de Pandora" show that the school where the children study is an old castle, possibly renovated to function as a school. It is also shown, especially in "O Antagonista" and "Detenção de la Detención", that there is a dungeon that serves as detention for the children.
• Picture Day: The episode "O Antagonista" is about Pepe trying to get a good class photo in his ancestor's glorious shirt, but it quickly becomes a parody of a Slasher movie. In the English dub, this episode is called "Picture Day Panic".
• Potty Emergency: In the beginning of "Nas Montanhas Russas da Loucura", Pepe drinks a lot of soda and tries to hold it together for the rest of the episode until he finds a bathroom.
• Shout-Out: Most include references to horror media, although there are other varied references to other media:
  • The episode "Como Pepe Arruinou o Natal" has a similar name to How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, although the plot is a reference to Pet Sematary along with Jurassic Park.
  • Bhutumu, a monster that appeared in the episode "O Fim do Mundo", is an allusion to Cthulhu from Cthulhu Mythos.
  • The episode "Detenção de la Detención" is an allusion to Saw.
  • The name of episode "Nas Montanhas Russas da Loucura" is a pun on the Portuguese name for At the Mountains of Madness.
  • There's a goat named Acabra Christie (Agoata Christie) in "A Culpa é Sempre do Mordomo", a pun on Agatha Christie.
  • Sérgio, from episode "Sérgio", is a mutant turtle, a not-so-straight parody of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
  • The episode "O Pêlo que Habito" is a reference to A Nightmare on Elm Street.
  • The titular villain of the episode "Kumo Tatchi" physically resembles Samara Morgan from The Ring, being a resentful spirit with long black hair. And to make the reference even more obvious, there is a scene where Pepe tells Gastón that he didn't intend to take them to the massage parlor, but rather to a sinister well nearby.
  • The episode title "Os Pepenautas do Caribe" is a play on words with the name of the "Pirates of the Caribbean" franchise.
  • In "Monstro Adorado da Piscina", Kraka brazenly sings the chorus of the Brazilian version of the song "Under the Sea" from "TheLittleMermaid".
  • The episode title "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is a direct reference to the song of the same name by the band Nirvana, in addition to other more subtle references to the band and to Kurt Cobain.
  • In "O Antagonista" there is a scene in the art classroom that shows masks of Michael Myers, Jason Voorheers, Ghostface, Jigsaw and Austin Powers.
  • The episode title "Cáren, A Estranha" is a specific case of being a In Name Only reference to the Brazilian name from the book "Carrie" (Carrie, A Estranha ^note  The Stranger ).
  • The episode title "Trem da Alegria" is a reference to the Brazilian children's musical group from the 80s that was also called Trem da Alegria.
  • The episode title "Assim Falou Zaratristhe" is a reference to the Portuguese title of the work "Also sprach Zarathustra" by the existentialist philosopher Nietzsche.
  • In "O Inimímico", it is shown that Guto and Gastón, when they were little children, wore black sailor uniforms just like Quico from "El Chavo del ocho".
• Time Abyss: Adding to her ambiguously human status, Vó also dated a mummified pharaoh in "Múmia do Amor". Even Pepe finds it difficult to imagine her younger.
• Van Helsing Hate Crimes: This trope is explored in the episode "O Pombisomem" through Jack Hunter, a hunter with extreme prejudice against monsters and hunts them for his show of the same name. When Pepe transforms into werepigeon through Color Me Black he learns to overcome his prejudice.
• Visual Pun: There are some examples based on popular Brazilian expressions:
  • In "Catarino", when the children go to visit a sick Pepe, Guto says that they "made a vaquinha". He then gives him a plush cow and after that declares that they also raised money to buy him medicine. "Fazer uma vaquinha" (to make a small cow, literally translated) means to raise money for a cause.
    • In the same episode, Pepe chooses to listen to the suggestion of a man named Jerico that Pepe shelter Catarino in his nose. When he mentions this idea to Vó, she says that she thinks it's a "ideia de Jerico". The expression "Jerico's idea" is used to refer to a stupid idea.
  • In "Top Bruxa", the Devil says he has a bakery on the verge of bankruptcy called "O Pão que o Diabo Amassou" (The Bread that the Devil Kneaded). This is a reference to the expression "to eat the bread that the devil kneaded", which means to go through difficulties.
  • Another more obvious example is in "Tal Mãe, Tal Vó" where during a discussion between Vó and Bisa, Antenor declares that they have always argued this way and will continue to do so "until death do them part". Then, it is Morte (literally, The Grim Reaper) who separates them from the discussion, saying that's enough.