Crazy Dave

Character Description

Crazy Dave is an inventor. He lives with and grows sentient plants, whom he uses to fight against Dr. Zomboss and his zombie army. Dave’s niece Patrice Blazing and her friend Nate Timely often help him in his adventures.

Dave is usually not very aware of what is going on, and often only saves the day through the intervention of Patrice, Nate, and the plants.

Dave usually only speaks in nonsense words, which only Patrice can understand and interpret for others. For instance, “Graggle-blogfiggle” means “Done! My time machine is done! Aaah ha ha ha ha ha!” Sometimes he mixes in real words that make no sense in context, such as “Lop-ling yogurt rattle rex!” which means “step outside.” In Lawnmageddon, he occasionally spoke in complete English sentences; he no longer does so.

Crazy Dave collects Leapfrog Quarterly, and is only missing the fifth issue. He enjoys watching the Pandora’s Plants soap opera, and likes to drink lemonade with the kids. He hates cats with a passion.

Dave lives in a house with a greenhouse and garage. He also owns an abandoned family mansion with a giant windmill on top.

Major Story Arcs

Lawnmageddon

When Nate and Patrice run to Dave's house to escape the horde of zombies invading Neighborville, they learn that Dave has been expecting this to happen, and has developed a special strain of sentient, powered plants to defend the town. He has also seeded many of the plants throughout the town. (Dave also expects aliens, ghost pirates, bigfooters, ninjas, internet cats, and his third-grade teacher to invade the town as well.)

Patrice and Nate use the plants to fight off the zombies, but there are too many, and Zomboss also starts a machine that blocks the sun with a cloud of smoke, draining the plants of their power. Dave comes up with a plan to make a home-made fire-breathing T. rex robot, just for fun, and also decides they should use the giant windmill on top of the family mansion to blow the cloud away.

They manage to get the windmill turned on and recharge the plants, and somehow Dave builds his T. rex in his free time to help drive the zombies away. Dave and the kids eat some celebratory pancakes cooked on his truck's engine.

Timepocalypse

Dr. Zomboss invents a sun vacuum that will destroy all the plants by depriving them of sunlight. However, once of his zombies drops a Pop Smart into the machine, and it explodes, sending its pieces throughout time.

Luckily, Crazy Dave just happened to also build a time machine, and is able to go off on search of the parts, along with Patrice and Nate.

He drops off Patrice in ancient Egypt, then goes to a 1979 dance-off with Nate. Nate flubs the contest, but Dave wins like a boss and gets a sun vacuum part as a prize.

They collect Patrice, who got her part, and then Dave drops them both off in dinosaur times. He goes back home, where he forgets about them for a long time. He eventually remembers and saves them in the nick of time.

He then lends the time machine to the kids so they can get the machine’s parts from the future and from the pirate era.

When they return, he plans to build a sun magnifier, instead of a sun vacuum. However, he needs them to hold off the zombies. Patrice and Nate appear to be in a losing battle until they remember they can use the time machine to freeze the zombies in a time loop. Now that there’s no hurry, Dave fools around quite a bit but eventually builds the sun magnifier. They use it to boost their plants’ powers and defeat Zomboss.

Bully for You

Dave works out a new plant, the Magnifying Grass, by which they can spy out zombie actions from a distance. Lo and behold, they do indeed see a new zombie army of Dr. Zomboss’s. The kids ask Dave to get in the car to stop them, but Dave is in full zone-out mode, and doesn’t pay attention until Patrice says they’re getting ice cream. They all drive off towards the zombies. But when they get there, Dave leaves the kids with the zombies and goes looking for the ice cream.

He finds some, and gets a huge cone that threatens to melt before he finishes it. A crowd gathers to watch, hoping against hope that he completes his ice cream eating mission. Unfortunately, he fails, and it melts on the sidewalk. The kids run up, having just fought innumerable zombies, and want him to join in against the next wave. Dave, however, decides he needs to spend his time inventing unmeltable ice cream.

He succeeds in this important venture: his new ice cream can even withstand a direct hit from a flame thrower. When Nate and Patrice are later attacked by Zomboss and a new army, Dave forestalls them with a giant wall of unmeltable peanut butter and jelly ice cream, which Zomboss is unable to penetrate with his new favorite heat-ray weapon. Zomboss leaves, full of frustration.

Grown Sweet Home

Crazy Dave goes on an inventing spree. When he creates a portable robot sun, he drives the plants out of the house, and they move into the old family mansion. He unsuccessfully tries to help Nate and Patrice teach the plants to act more like humans. Later, when the plants and zombies get into a conflict, Dave saves the plants and the kids from defeat, but doesn't even realize he's doing sp; he just forgot how to pour lemonade, and wanted the kids' help. When Zomboss starts a zombie parade in the middle of town, Dave joins in with his own peanut-butter-and-jelly-with-cheese-making car, and helps the team battle the zombies.

Petal to the Metal

Zomboss develops a group of souped-up race cars to take over Neighborville--the Black Tornado, Zombie Sledge-Rammer, and Doom-Stuart. Crazy Dave, meanwhile, is trying to beat an The zombies invade town, but Nate, Patrice, and Crazy Dave challenge them to a race. Dave builds an Ice-Cream Racer, a car with an ice cream machine attached, which Nate is particularly excited about. Zomboss accepts, and they race out into the desert. The plants are winning, with their solar-powered cars, although Zomboss does try to stop them with a smoke machine, and his zombie team doesn't need to sleep. Eventually, the kids realize that Dave has mysteriously disappeared from the car with no explanation! They try to figure out another driver and have a variety of problems finding a solution. However, Zomboss eventually admits that the whole thing was a distraction, since he left a team of zombies behind to take over Neighborville while the plants are gone. The kids race back towards town.

Back in town, the kids challenge Zomboss to another race around Neighborville. After various sections of the race, Zomboss attacks with a Massive Munch Machine. Dave counters it with a robot Dino-Pig--a robot version of an attraction they saw along the road--and ultimately gets the Munch Machine to slip on a banana and fall to pieces. The kids claim a victory and tell Zomboss to leave town, but he shows them that it was a tie, since Mr. Stubbins was actually riding on the front of the plants' car when it passed the finish line.

Boom Boom Mushroom

While Zomboss is creating a plan to drop Neighborville into a system of caves below the surface, Dave is working to invent ice cream that changes according to its moods, including Sympathetic Strawberry, Bewildered Blueberry, and Pessimistic Plum. After the kids discover Zomboss's plan, Dave reveals Twister, a Guatemalan pig-dog with a very sensitive nose. He won her in a bard game contest, where he outsang other bards. Together they had a variety of adventures, including a challenge with armored mermaids, and discovering the Boom Boom Mushroom, which secretly dwells below the city. The kids go off to find the Mushroom.

Dave eventually meanders down below and does some cave karaoke, cave interpretive dance, and cave painting, the last of which includes the plans for the hydraulic elevator that Zomboss wants to use to lower the city. Nate and Twister use these plans to rewire the elevator, sending the zombies to the surface where they can be defeated.

Garden Warfare

Zomboss creates a portal to the future, and uses mechanical arms to grab advanced technology from the future and bring it back to our time. With these new resources, he outfits the imps in Z-Mechs, advanced mech suits that are much stronger than normal zombies.

With this new army, he invades Neighborville. The town has been evacuated due to a trick by future-Patrice and –Nate, who sent everyone away on an ice cream cruise. The zombies still face resistance from the current and future versions of the kids, from Rose, a sorceress from the past, and from Citron, a plant that old-man Dave creates in the future. However, the zombies are very successful and soon overtake much of the town.

Dave almost leaves on the cruise, but Patrice persuades him to stay, and he soon starts work on a special frog-burping machine. The sound the burping frogs make cancel out the energy of the time portals, so Zomboss has trouble getting more resources. Furthermore, some odd living garden gnomes that seem to see themselves as protectors of the time stream keep creeping around, with the intent of stopping Zomboss’s machinations with time. Eventually, it seems like the frog-burping machine works well enough that the gnomes no longer feel the need to stop Zomboss themselves, and they leave without ever announcing their presence. Finally, future-Patrice and Citron go to the future and trick Zomboss into grabbing an E.M. Peach, which explodes upon returning to the present, and destroys all of Zomboss’s future tech.

Dave gives one of the frogs a medal for his part in the battle.

Unrest in the Old West (Free Comic Day 2017)

The Plants, their human friends, and the Zombies are transported back in time to the Old West when Tugboat mistakes the time machine for a Pop Smarts Toaster, where they are forced to team up to do chores for Sheriff Tarnation, who has taken their time machine.

Crazy Dave wanders off while the others do the chores. Instead, he discovers oil, finds gold, rescues a trapped miner and a horde of bats, releases a spurting fountain of lemonade from the ground, and searches for water. When he finds the water, it floods the town, creating a water park, and ends much of the tension with the town and the plants and zombies.

When they finally return to the present, the formerly-trapped miner and bats come too, and eat all of Zomboss's Pop Smarts.

Powers and Abilities

Crazy Dave is a genius inventor. He invented a time-machine, a sun magnifier that increases the amount of sun that the plants can receive, as well as lesser inventions such as toe-massaging shoes, unmeltable ice cream (and various other ice-cream-related machines such as an ice-cream-seeking robot and an ice-cream-grabbing robot), and a pancake grill on his car engine. He can create complex machines from simple objects, such as when he made a fire-breathing T. rex made out of 7 gopher traps, 6 jars of peanut butter, 5 incendiary grenades, 85 feet of rubber hose, 9 motorcycle headlights, a complete set of the Adventures of Captain Caterpillar, and 55 shoe inserts. Other examples of his inventions include an invisible mirror, a robotic orange juice container with artificial intelligence, a self-driving robot sunlight machine, and anti-gravity goldfish. He was able to set up a group of frogs that burped in the precise harmonic frequency necessary to cancel out time travel portals.

His main achievement is developing the plants into their current advanced form.

He is also capable of “reading” otherwise indecipherable information about objects by licking them. For instance, he licked one of Zomboss’s sun vacuum pieces, and was able to tell that it came from a sun vacuum machine, that it was built by Zomboss, and that the machine was blown up and the pieces were sent through time. By looking at the scratches on it, he could tell that Zomboss sent his zombies after the machine.

Crazy Dave is an award-winning dancer, having handily won a 1979 disco dance contest. He is also an excellent singer, having won a bard game, singing against other professional bards.

Dave is a capable coordinator of the sentient plants that they use to fight the zombie armies.

Dave claims to have not slept for 15 years.