The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy

The show's main characters. From left to right: Billy, Mandy, and Grim.

The series is centered around the exploits of Billy (Richard Steven Horvitz), a completely idiotic and happy-go-lucky boy; Mandy (Grey DeLisle), a cynical, intelligent, and merciless girl; and Grim (Greg Eagles), a Jamaican-accented Reaper. After Billy and Mandy cheated at a limbo match against Grim (in retaliation for putting the limbo rod too low for them to go under), he is enslaved in a permanently unwanted friendship with the children.[1] Grim is miserable in the first days of his servitude, and even fantasizes about killing them multiple times. However, as the time passes, he gradually adapts to the new life, and even grows to care for Billy and Mandy, if only somewhat. Despite this, he retains a love–hate relationship with the two and desires to eventually break free from his servitude.

Billy and Mandy use Grim's supernatural abilities and powers to venture into supernatural locations or environments, such as the Underworld, or the Netherworld, inhabited by an assortment of grotesque monstrous beasts. The pair also use Grim's enormously strong supernatural abilities or ties with a number of beastly characters to achieve goals or desires for themselves, often with twisted results. Famed fictional monsters including Dracula, the Wolfman, and the bogeyman are also comically depicted in the series.

Supporting characters include Irwin (Vanessa Marshall), a nerdy awkward boy who has a crush on Mandy; Harold (Richard Steven Horvitz), Billy's father who is even dumber than his son; Gladys (Jennifer Hale), Billy's loving yet mentally unstable mother; Mindy (Rachael MacFarlane), the snobby, stuck-up, and spoiled queen bee of Billy and Mandy's school; Sperg (Greg Eagles), the local bully who has a sensitive side; Fred Fredburger (C. H. Greenblatt), a simple-minded, irritating underworld creature who loves frozen yogurt and nachos; Dracula (Phil LaMarr), a selfish elderly vampire who is revealed to be Irwin's paternal grandfather in the final season of the show.

The show lacks continuity for the most part, as many episodes end with characters killed, exiled, or stuck in a situation. Characters sometimes display an awareness of some events from previous episodes, but there are no clear character arcs or coherent plot lines tying the show together.

The series had its genesis in 1995, when Maxwell Atoms, while he was a junior at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, made a two-minute short film for his thesis project. Titled Billy and Mandy in: The Trepanation of the Skull and You, it centers around Billy and Mandy (prototype versions) discussing trepanning with each other. In the end, Mandy drills Billy's head, causing him to pass out after too much blood loss even though he says he feels great. The short had never been shown publicly until April 30, 2016, during the first annual TromAnimation Film Festival.[2] After the screening, Atoms uploaded the film, albeit in a deteriorating state after years of storage, on his YouTube channel.

Atoms originally pitched the Billy and Mandy concept to Nickelodeon, but it was rejected by the network. The show's existence is the result of a viewer poll event by way of telephone and the Internet called Cartoon Network's Big Pick which was held from June 16 to August 25, 2000.[3] The three final choices were Grim and Evil (later splitting into two separate series: The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy and Evil Con Carne), Whatever Happened to... Robot Jones?, and Longhair and Doubledome.[3] Out of the three, Grim and Evil attained the most votes with 57%; Robot Jones came in second place at 23% while Longhair and Doubledome received 20% of the vote.[3][4]

Originally part of Grim & Evil, Billy & Mandy served as the main show. In each episode, an Evil Con Carne short was put between two Grim shorts.[3] On occasion, it was the other way around, with two Evil shorts and one Grim short. The series premiered on August 24, 2001, during the Cartoon Cartoon Fridays Big Pick Weekend.

Another batch of 13 half-hour episodes were produced for Grim & Evil, but on June 13, 2003, the network separated the two segments and gave each their own full-length program. The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy ran for 6 seasons (with the first season containing 18 half-hour episodes, consisting of 49 Grim & Evil shorts, and one bonus short "Five-O-Clock Shadows"), while the short-lived Evil Con Carne show was cancelled once the already-produced season had aired. Some characters from Evil Con Carne occasionally appeared on The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy. General Skarr became an official character on the show in the episode "Skarred for Life", where he becomes Billy's new next-door neighbor. In "Company Halt", the ninth episode of the final season which also functions as the true series finale for Evil Con Carne, Ghastly, Hector, Boskov, and Stomach restart their evil organization and convince Skarr to rejoin them, but their plans are ultimately foiled by Billy and Mandy, and Skarr goes back to living his life as a normal person.

Three TV movies were made for the series. The first one was called Billy & Mandy's Big Boogey Adventure and was released on DVD in April, 2007.[12]

A second movie, Wrath of the Spider Queen, was also released in 2007. It was based on a spider queen from Grim's distant past, who tries to take revenge on him because she was meant to be the reaper. Meanwhile, keeping up with the spider theme, Billy learns to love his spider son Jeff.[13]

On October 12, 2008, a third and final spin-off movie, titled Underfist: Halloween Bash, premiered on Cartoon Network. The movie's primary focus is on Irwin, Jeff the Spider, Hoss Delgado, General Skarr, and Fred Fredburger accidentally coming together to defeat an invasion of chocolate bar monsters, led by an evil marshmallow bunny, on Halloween night.[14]

• Evil Con Carne
• Grim & Evil

Wikiquote has quotations related to: The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy

• The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy at the Big Cartoon DataBase
• The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy at IMDb
• The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy at TV.com
• Markstein, Donald D. "The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy". Toonopedia. Archived from the original on September 1, 2016.