My Gym Partner’s a Monkey is what I would consider the 1st Cartoon Network series in the Transition period between Classic and Modern CN. Coming out in a time of experimentation when the strange and unusual started to reign…..some of them weren’t very good, but this is one of the more classic series, with a surprisingly interesting world and is more closely associated with the older shows, so I thought it would be neat to take a dive into this show and discuss its power and see how to be OP in the wild halls of Charles Darwin Middle School!
Town Tier:
This is the solo tier of the series where one will find the entire cast of characters. One would naturally think with the wide variety of animals featured from insects to whales, there’d have to be multiple tiers, but the series has repeatedly shown things such as a 1 Ton Rhino getting his butt kicked by an 8 Ounce Frog, so clearly the opposite is true and everyone here can generally compete with one another.
In terms of raw power, Animals are stronger than people, yes, but this series seems to go a bit extreme with it, with characters regularly tossing others into orbit, shattering large buildings with minimal effort, and having the school explode on top of them. Their best feats of power and durability come from the multiple times a character attacks someone, and the force of said attack is expressed by the show cutting to 1950s footage of a Hydrogen Bomb going off. Hydrogen Bombs at the time were capable of unleashing an equivalent explosive yield anywhere from 100 Kilotons to 1.5 Megatons of TNT, with a 1.5 Megaton one specifically being used by Adam’s scream attack late into the series, which while being enough to defeat the characters, was still endured by everyone at the school, so High Kilotons seems to be the average power of characters in verse.
In terms of Speed, characters in this series are Really rather fast for their power tier, with even early into the series Adam and Jake being able to do their famous Shiny duel where they consistently dodged around, block and outpace reflected light beams, and this was kept fairly consistent in verse with characters having feats of moving in tandem with sunlight. So the characters in this verse are able to move at the speed of light if not somewhat faster.
Characters tend to have fairly good secondary stats in this series as well, with all the characters having Black Belt level martial arts training in their classes, and often able to perform impressive feats of skill and dexterity, or perform tasks for days on end without tiring. And while there are a lot of fairly low intelligent characters in this series, there are also some standouts such as the Spiffies that can build advanced technology like Robots, Laser Cannons, Cloning tech and Mind Control Helmets.
The series takes place in Charles Darwin Middle School, a School for anthropomorphic young animals from the local Zoo to learn how to be animals, which the human main character Adam Lyon accidentally was enrolled in due to a Bureaucratic Clerical Error that never gets corrected. As such every single ‘Power’ one could naturally find in the animal kingdom is on the table here. This includes Flight, Numerous varieties and degrees of Super Senses, stealth abilities, advanced digging or climbing, many different kinds of Poisons/Venoms and more niche specific powers like Eels generating electricity, Skunks using a stink spray or Chameleons turning completely invisible.
But that's just the somewhat realistic powers found in this verse, they have plenty of more out there powers too, the most prominent of which is their sheer Regeneration, with characters constantly being able to instantaneously come back from having their limbs or head explode, being reduced to skeletons, and in one case Lupe surviving having her entire body explode leaving no visible trace except her beak, then her beak ALSO exploding and leaving no visible trace at all. This would be considered at least High regeneration, allowing characters to come back even if only microscopic pieces of their form remain. Other common powers possessed by most if not all of the cast include Teleportation, entering into people's Dreams somehow, as well as some advanced 4th Wall Awareness, which also enables them to hear characters Voice Over, and both summon and witness Flashbacks, including for things none of the present characters were actually there for technically giving them a way to learn of any past event.
Getting into individual characters, the consistently weakest character in the verse is the human, Adam Lyon. Despite this weakness he has proven to be fairly tough on multiple occasions, being able to shrug off Eating Radiation, and being thrown into the Vacuum of Space wearing nothing but a Cheerleader outfit on two different occasions with no negative effect. Adam is also one of the most intelligent characters in the verse, possessing a completely photographic memory, and carries a Captain Clowney bird control device, which once allowed his friend Kerry to mind control an entire flock of birds to do her bidding.
Adam’s best friend, Jake Spidermonkey, is far more versatile showing off far more out there powers. Jake can grow extra appendages, flawlessly impersonate any voice, elastically stretch and contort his body, and Hypnotize people using his Butt. He knows multiple mystical Yogi techniques that enable him to levitate, flawlessly see and predict the future, literally summon vines for himself to swing from in any environment, make himself invisible to all but those that he wants to see him, and he even has some form of Matter Manipulation, as he was able to successfully achieve Photosynthesis and turn Carbon Dioxide into Oxygen inside of his body. But that's got nothing on the fact that Jake, well, he Knows a Guy.
Winsor has a super powerful sonic roar attack that can make people's heads explode, and spatially removed Jake’s eyes. Both he and Slips also displayed the ability to fly and turn intangible. Ingrid has the ability to teleport herself and others through Time and used this to travel to Adam’s past Thanksgivings. Nurse Gazelle has excellent hunting skills and chemically enhanced darts and Mr. Mandrill can summon forth a psychic trip that can affect large groups of people. There's also a lot of other weird and bizarre creatures found in this verse including Wizards, Ghosts, Talking Tumbleweeds that can enter into the black screen after an Iris in, as well as Robots, who are somewhat superior to the normal characters, they possess powers such as flight, disintegration beams and the ability to generate robot duplicates of others they come across. Probably the most Hax character in the verse to deal with is David Coppertrout, the magical wish granting fish. David has reality warping powers that allowed him to do things such as BFR Adam into the Dinosaur era, fly, cast illusions, teleport huge amounts of people, know others’ true feelings with enhanced perception and turn the world into a Musical where everyone would break into periodic musical numbers.
So what are some Weaknesses that are found in this verse? Well one of the more obvious ones are the characters are a bunch of animals, so with only a few notable exceptions the characters tend not to be all that bright. They definitely aren’t Fairly Oddparents dumb but they are naive and easily manipulated, tending to interpret information incorrectly, so a trickster of some kind would get pretty far here. All the Animals characters, so basically everyone you’d have to worry about but Adam, also have two huge specific weaknesses. The first is that Musical Instruments will cause all animals that hear it to instantly fall asleep. Music Soothes the Savage Beast in this verse to the point the actual School Orchestra makes music with random objects because of this problem. The second, and arguably worse weakness is Shiny Things, which seem to possess an insane hypnotic power over any animal that witnesses it. Jake was able to completely take over the school and turn every one of his animal peers and authority figures into defenseless mind controlled slaves just by bringing a Glass Doorknob to school. So yeah, if the character is a musician or happens to carry something particularly shiny, that in and of itself is a huge advantage. So with that in mind what counters could we potentially use here?
Mirror Master:
Somebody I feel would be particularly dangerous here would be none other than Mirror master from DC Comics. Now let's be honest, as a character whose powers are centralized around Mirrors, he already meets the reflective angle and could end up accidentally mind controlling like 99% of the cast of this show on sight. But even if we discounted that, this ol boys got quite a lotta tricks to pull out to give this verse a hard time. He can simply enter into the Mirror Dimension and he’d effectively become safe from any attack any of these characters attempt to throw at him, even Ingrid’s time manipulation would not be effective as the Mirror Dimension exists outside of spacetime. Mirror Master can create illusions and duplicate himself which would make him incredibly slippery even if caught out in the open despite his speed gap, let's be real, he’s fought FAR faster and more capable using these techniques. He’s also got multiple ways that would finish off the Animal students with just one hit, despite their regeneration, such as trapping them in the Mirror Dimension for a BFR or using his Mirror gun to transmutate them into glass and shatter them. That said, he would be vulnerable to Winsor’s Sonic Roar attack shattering his mirrors and his stats are FAR lower than those of the cast and if they do manage to get their hands on him they’d tear him apart, While unlikely another option you could use…
Tart:
Tart from the environmental magical girl series Tokyo Mew Mew would work quite well in this verse. Tart is capable of flying into orbit at speeds of over Mach 2,000 and fighting head to head with the Mew Mews who have Kiloton level feats. While the Charles Darwin student’s DO have a notable physical edge over him, Tart has a lot of powers such as flight, teleportation, invisibility and dimensional travel that would make him really hard to pin down. Plus he kinda makes up for it with just how broken one of his primary abilities is, the power to make Chimera Animals. With this he could literally spread himself out like a plague turning the characters into supercharged monsters that serve him and making the entire school destroy itself while he sadistically laughs and laughs. While it would be impossible for his enhanced minions to finish anyone off he Would eventually take over the entire school with this power, and additionally his species has the ability to absorb the Spirits of beings and trap people in pocket dimensions, which are clear one shot hax if he ever needs to use those. So this would be a dangerous mission for him, but it’s one I think he is well prepared for.
Deadpool:
So another potential character one could use would be the Merc with a Mouth himself, Deadpool. Wade clearly has multiple Multi City Block level and Mach 5,000 feats and has insane levels of skill that has allowed him to battle competent heroes like Iron Fist before, who is far stronger than him and has Lightspeed reactions. With his healing factor, Wade can shrug off most of the injuries that the characters of this verse could cause him anyway, as he's been able to quickly heal back from having massive holes blown through him and being flattened into paste before. Deadpool has tons of shiny metal weapons to use such as swords and guns which more than likely would end up controlling characters which Wade would quickly become privy to in the fight and begin using to his advantage. His Teleportation device is not only good for letting him quickly escape and get the drop on his opponents, but also teleporting anything from his large warehouse of weapons and supplies into his possession and he could just start bringing in all his shiniest things to become the king of the school just like Jake did but with no risk to himself. But could Wade actually kill these characters? Well absolutely, Wade can generate energy fields that he surrounds his blades with, enabling them to cut straight through characters as durable as The Hulk, so he’d have little trouble overcoming their durability. So Wade, while I think this would initially go south for him if he ended up fighting a bunch of animals at once, he’d eventually be able to pull this off in the long run. But If you want a faster option…
Hibiscusy:
My Gym Partner’s a Monkey has an entire special where the characters go to Hawaii so I thought who better to take care of its characters than the leader of the Hawaiian branch of the Dark Agency from Codename: Sailor V, Hibiscusy. Hibiscucy like most of the characters in this verse is at the very least a villain of Sailor V, a weaker non awakened form of Sailor Venus who still has stats basically exactly the same as the MGPaM characters so she’d clearly be able to compete here. Hibiscusy has two primary abilities that will be quite relevant here, those being energy draining, something the characters at this verse have never encountered before and can kill them despite their defenses, as well as Brainwashing, something that Constantly works on the characters of this verse. Both of these powers have absolutely INSANE Range on them by most standards, able to affect entire nations at once, so it stands to reason if any of the characters in this verse are anywhere near her they are in danger of getting instantly merked. The only danger is because Hibiscusy is a physical being, and definitely doesn’t fully scale TO Sailor V physically meaning she’d be weaker than these characters, they Could get lucky and oneshot her if she’s caught off guard, For the safest option,
Freddy Kruegar:
Yeah, when it comes to characters at this specific Stat Range, it's hard to be much more of a standard for OP than Freddy Kruegar from Nightmare on Elm Street. Freddy has been able to form gigantic clouds and make it rain blood over Washington DC giving him a slight power advantage in the low Megatons and also has been able to telekinetically move objects around at light speed and fight against characters comparable to that, meaning he's more than capable of fighting the animals in this tier physically. As a reality warping dream demon, Freddy has counters to basically ANYthing this verse has to offer, having the ability to harm intangibles, manipulate time to a superior degree, enter into dreams and kill people in numerous ways that their regeneration wouldn’t be able to defend against such as eating their souls or turning them into a stove. Freddy is basically a swiss army knife of hax who’d be more than able to out fox these various animal combatants and get in a kill, and with his own various defenses like Intangibility, Duplication and equally good Regeneration it would be a massive uphill battle for them to figure out and execute a plan to stop him. Meanwhile Freddy is the master of Nightmares and would be able to look into any of their minds and find their weaknesses and irrational fears and easily replicate those to make his victory all the faster. I don’t think Freddy would struggle here even if the entire verse teamed up on him.
