Z-O-M-B-I-E-S: The Re-Animated Series is an animated musical series airing on the Disney Channel. Spinning off from the Z-O-M-B-I-E-S series of movies, it features the stars of those movies, including Milo Manheim and Meg Donnelly, serving as the voice cast. The first season premiered on June 28, 2024, and a second season is set to premiere in Fall 2026.
Set between the events of Z-O-M-B-I-E-S 3 and Z-O-M-B-I-E-S 4: Dawn of the Vampires, after completing her senior year of high school at Seabrook High, Addison wishes that she could re-do the year with all the new friends she's made along the way. A-Spen, using time-travel technology, obliges her, but the result is a school year filled with new and weirder events.
The series was preceded by a series of animated shorts that aired during commercial breaks.
This series contains examples of:
- Acoustic License: Principal Lee in "Young, Wild and Free Period" responds to something Zed says while exiting the school when she is in a second story window. She lampshades how she was able to hear him before marveling at the school's great acoustics.
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Lampshaded in "Waved and Confused" when Eliza creates an AI-powered debate coach to help Zed prepare for a debate. She explicitly tells Zed not to connect it to the Internet, as she did not program the AI for morality and thus can't be assured that it won't become corrupted, but the debate bot convinces Zed that the risks of it becoming corrupted are lower than the risks that he will lose the debate unless the AI can expand its parameters, so he connects it to the net and it decides to destroy the world, starting with Seabrook.
- Animated Adaptation: To the Z-O-M-B-I-E-S series of live-action movies. Otherwise, why else would it be called Re-Animated?
- Art Shift: This How Not To Draw video
portrays the characters in 2D animation. - The Big Guy: The Sasquatch towers over all the other residents of Seabrook, even Bonzo.
- Bittersweet Ending: "The More, The Burier" ends with Wyatt deciding that he needs to rebuild a friendship with Eliza before making any attempt to get back together with her romantically. While both are able to live with this, neither of them looks especially happy.
- Blue-and-Orange Morality: A-Spen does not spend a lot of time thinking about the morality of their actions. For instance, the opening minutes of the show see them casually sending everyone back in time to the start of the school year simply because they wanted to spend more time with their friends, with no thought about the consequences of everyone reliving the year.
- Brain Bleach: After encountering a simulation of Wyatt that Eliza made which malfunctioned, putting his head on a raccoon's body, a horrified Zed asks that Eliza beat him over the head so that he'll forget seeing the thing.
- Brand X: Zedd mentions that he used to write about his favorite show on "Undead-Journal".
- Buddy Cop Show: Parodied in "These Boots Were Made for Willa", in which Willa reluctantly enlists Bree's help to find out who stole her boots. Bree treats the whole thing like a police procedural, much to Willa's annoyance, as she just wants to tear her way through Seabrook High until she finds the culprit.
- Call-Back:
- In "Double Troubled", Addison and Zed use the strange meteorite from "I Think We're a Clone Now" to create clones of themselves so that they can blow off a homework assignment in order to see a movie together.
- In "No Woman BFF'd Behind", Wynter warns Addison and Bree not to go too far into the woods, because they might run into the Solstice Slasher. Addison points out that the last time the werewolves told her about the Solstice Slasher, it turned out to be a prank, but this time, it turns out that there actually is a Solstice Slasher.
- In "A Fridge Too Far", Eliza notes that the refrigerator monster looks almost exactly like the pizza monster from the cook-out short, just with different coloring. The short also features the return of Petite Gout - Zed finally found a way to make that drinkable.
- Career Path Concerns: In "Ready Player Wynter", Wynter is extremely stressed out about having to choose a career, as she can't decide on a single career and her... excitable personality makes it hard for her to find contentment with just one career.
- Can't Spit It Out: In "A Wyatt Place", Wyatt struggles to ask Eliza out and in desperation, asks Willa and Bucky for help. While their advice is terrible, it does at least boost his confidence enough that he's able to ask Eliza out on a date.
- Casting Gag: One episode features Jordan Kelpper of The Opposition with Jordan Klepper playing a debate robot, performing similar silly arguments to the show. And a few accurate ones similar to his Fingering the Pulse segments on The Daily Show.
- Cool Older Sibling-in-Law: Zoey gets along pretty well with her big brother's girlfriend Addison, as they both love cheerleading and both volunteer at the local animal shelter together.
- Denser and Wackier: While the movies had just zombies, werewolves (as of the second) and aliens (as of the third), the re-animated series includes a lot of other wacky supernatural things on a regular basis and more slapstick.
- Didn't Think This Through:
- In "Invasion of the Bucky Snatchers", Bucky uses a stolen telepathy device to force everyone in Seabrook to think like he does. He assumes that in this new "Buck-topia", he'd automatically be the leader and the center of attention, but instead he keeps getting upstaged in the musical numbers and Eliza ends up usurping him by virtue of being smarter and more passionate than he is.
- In one of the ShrimpTok videos, Wynter decides to play a prank on a sleeping Willa, apparently forgetting that Willa is a violent Alpha Bitch with a Hair-Trigger Temper. Naturally, after realizing that she's being filmed for an Internet video, Willa decides to chase Wynter down and presumably beat the crap out of her.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: In "Awootiful Mind", Eliza develops a wristband that forces Wynter's brain to work "normally", because she and Wynter are paired for a quiz bowl and Wynter needs to be able to answer the questions in five seconds or less. It's very similar to some of the more extreme methods for curbing neurodivergent behavior in children.
- The Dreaded: Bree is an extremely effective debater, to the point that Addison and even Willa run at the thought of merely training Zed to go against her. Her own ruthless behavior at crushing her opponents supports this reputation, while mentioning her in the context of debating invokes Dramatic Thunder.
- Emotion Eater: "The More The Burier" has Wyatt literally burying his feelings about his breakup with Eliza accidentally creating a mud monster that feeds on his emotions by eating the objects that evoke them. This leaves Wyatt feeling nothing, since it fed on his positive emotions as well, so his "Muddy Buddy" decides to keep feeding by eating the source of his emotional turmoil, Eliza herself.
- Evil Doppelgänger: In "I Think We're a Clone Now", Addison creates a whole army of clones of herself in order to keep up with her schedule. Said clones all turn out to be evil.
- Subverted in "Double Troubled", where Zed accuses the clones of being evil, but they point out that he, Addison, and Eliza created them for the sole purpose of enslaving them, which is way more evil than anything they'd planned to do. Eliza and Addison concede the point, as does Zed, eventually.
- Extra-Long Episode: In contrast to the usual Two Shorts format, "Screambrook", "I Wanna Dance with Some Zombie" and "Santler Claws is Comin' to Town" are all half hour episodes.
- Fan Bonding: In "Last Fan Standing", Bree and Dae develop a friendship over their shared love of the band Werewalien, but this friendship is nearly threatened when they both enter a fan contest and fight over which of them is the biggest fan of Werewalien.
- Fantastic Drug: In "I Scream Zoda", Zed invents a super-addictive soft drink called Zoda which has the unfortunate side-effect of turning those who drink it into mindless Zoda fiends.
- Fictional Folklore: The Solstice Slasher is officially just a legend made up to scare young werewolves, but since All Myths Are True in this universe, there actually is a Solstice Slasher somewhere out there, deep in the woods outside of Seabrook. Oddly enough, he's the Coach's long lost best friend.
- Fictional Traditions: Most werewolf holidays center around hunting and meat-eating. Especially significant to the narrative is the Great Meat Hunt, where a randomly-chosen member of the pack hunts one of the various supernatural creatures that inhabit the woods outside of Seabrook and then brings the carcass back to the rest of the pack to be cooked and eaten.
- Forced Out of the Closet: Non-sexual example; In "Catch Meat If You Can", Eliza finds out that Wyatt's a vegetarian and urges him to tell the other werewolves, as he's been selected to lead their annual monster hunt, during which he is expected to kill the beast and help the pack eat it. When he keeps trying to hide his vegetarianism from Willa, Eliza gets annoyed and outs him herself. While Willa accepts Wyatt for who he is, Wyatt is angry that Eliza revealed his secret on his behalf, and thus dumps her.
- Forgot About His Powers: In "Wynter Transport", Wynter begs Eliza to let her use her new teleporter so that she can go home and grab her homework and then come back before class begins. After getting home and grabbing her homework, she remembers that she's a werewolf, and thus can run 35 miles an hour.
- The Friends Who Never Hang: Due to the large cast and the limited runtime for each short, Addison and Zed's group of friends tends to be broken down into duos or trios, with some pairings occurring more frequently than others. This gets Played for Drama in "No Woman BFF'd Behind", where longtime best friends Addison and Bree realize that they haven't spent much time together recently and worry that they're drifting apart.
- From Bad to Worse: "Screambrook" has Seabrook getting worse and worse due to rising tensions between every species until the aliens arrive and reveal that they took a wrong turn through a black hole that turned them evil. They are poised to destroy everyone in Seabrook with a laser cannon.
- Gadgeteer Genius: Eliza enjoys building machines, and has even created the school's vending machine and water fountain using upcycled materials. In "Rage Against the Vending Machine", she tries to fight Bucky's efforts to replace her machines with new ones.
- Gentle Giant: Played straight with Bonzo, who is both incredibly tall but also a complete sweetheart. Subverted with the Sasquatch. While he's usually laid back, he does not hesitate to kick Wyatt's ass after the latter steals his dinner.
- Gratuitous French: In "I Scream Zoda", Principal Lee removes soda from the school to replace it with flavored sparkling water called "Sans Saveur", which is French for "without flavor". At the end, she replaces the Sans Saveur with "Petite Gout", which is French for "little flavor".
- Hand Wave: Exactly how A-Spen sent everyone back in time to the beginning of the year is not really explained, other than "time travel, but not time travel" (they claim the explanation only makes sense in Alien.) Zed suggests that everyone should just never think about it again.
- I Hate Past Me: In "Night of the Living Zed", Zed accidentally creates a digital ghost of his pre-teen self, who was obsessed with dance videos and My Tiny Horseys. He is mortified by his past self's behavior, but eventually comes to appreciate how his past interests contributed to his current personality.
- Heroic BSoD: In "Young, Wild and Free Period", A-Spen is rendered catatonic from stress, and thus Addison and Zed take advantage of their free period to try and figure out a way to restore A-Spen to normal.
- Heroic RRoD: In "Foul Play", Addison discovers the upper limits of her seemingly-inexhaustible energy when she agrees to direct the school play and tries to manage every aspect of it instead of delegating, causing her Alien powers to go haywire.
- How We Got Here: "Suddenly Seabrook" opens with Zed, Addison, Eliza, and Bucky trying to sneak past a giant carnivorous plant. When Bucky asks how they got into this situation, the short flashes back to earlier in the day, when Zed, Addison, and Eliza caused a mishap involving a pitcher plant, a can of toxic soda, and electricity.
- Hypocritical Humor: In "A Wyatt Place", the Sasquatch gives Wyatt a lecture about toxic masculinity and the folly of mistaking aggression for strength.. while he's beating the crap out of him. When Wyatt calls him out on this, the Sasquatch concedes that he is working on his own anger-management issues.
- The Internet Is for Cats: In "Something Funny to Tok About", Zed manages to argue for sparing humanity from the wrath of an Eldritch Abomination by showing the abomination cute videos of Razzy.
- Ink-Suit Actor: The artists at Atomic Cartoons designed the characters so that they could be reminiscent of their appearance in the movies while also fitting an animated format.
- It's All About Me: As in the movies, Bucky tries to make as many things about him as possible, for instance replacing all the vending machines and drinking fountains with new ones that bear his likeness on them.
- In Spite of a Nail: In "Screambrook", the Butterfly Effect causes a divergent timeline in which humans, zombies, and werewolves end up in a three-way, racially-charged dance war with each other and Wyatt is a raccoon, and yet somehow, Addison and Zed still end up falling in love and end up making peace between species.
- Jerkass Has a Point: In "Rage Against the Vending Machines", Bucky announces plans to replace Eliza's various machines with new ones. Eliza naturally tries to fight these efforts, as Bucky cares more about the new machines having his face on them than whether or not they remain functional. She relents, however, after Bucky points out that his machines don't require anyone to hold live wires just to get a drink, whereas at least one of hers does. She can't argue with that.
- Killer Rabbit: In "Catch Meat If You Can", the werewolves hunt the summer jackelope, which initially looks like a cute bunny with antlers, but then turns out to be a vicious, three-eyed Animalistic Abomination.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: There's a number of fourth wall taps. One in particular is in "Double Trouble", where Eliza worries about using the cloning meteor since what happened in that short...[pause to smirk at the camera] adventure they had with it the last time. Another example comes from "I Wanna Dance With Some Zombie", with Zed telling Addison about what they'll do next season.
- Let Us Never Speak of This Again: In "Cabin in the House", Zed discovers that Eliza's virtual camping site includes multiple flirty simulations of Wyatt, including one that has his face on a raccoon's body. A mortifed Eliza makes Zed promise to never speak of this again.
- Loony Fan: In "Last Fan Standing", Bree and Dae create magically-enhanced t-shirts in order to win a fan contest, but the magic corrupts them both, making them super-obsessed fans of Werewalien.
- Ludicrously Unwashed Object: Willa refuses to wash, or even de-odorize her boots, as they are a reminder of every hunt and fight that she's won. Eventually, Bucky gets tired of the stench, steals them, and destroys them. He does buy her a new pair of identical boots as compensation.
- Martial Beret: In the alternate timeline presented in "Screambrook", humans and zombies are embroiled in a (dance) war, and thus Bree and Bonzo, the leaders of the human and zombie armies, both wear berets to signify their authority.
- Neurodivergence Stigma: In "Awoo-tiful Mind", Wynter is explicitly revealed to be neurodivergent - she has difficulty focusing on tasks or relaying information in a straight line because of her werewolf brain. As Eliza has been paired with her in a trivia contest where they have only a few seconds to answer each question, she becomes frustrated with Wynter's relatively slow reasoning process and invents a wristband that "fixes" her brain to work in a straight line. Wynter consents to using it because she wants to win the contest just as much as Eliza does, but the wristband malfunctions and starts hurting her, ultimately costing them the contest when Wynter ends up too fried to remember the answer to a question that she could have easily answered without the wristband. Eliza is horrified with herself and apologizes profusely afterwards.
- Never My Fault: Zed frequently refuses to accept blame when one of his plans blows up in his face and creates problems for others.
- New Media Are Evil: Subverted in "Something to Tok About", where Zed convinces an Eldritch Abomination to spare humanity by showing it videos on the Internet.
- Non Sequitur Causality: Somehow Zed and Addison never getting together in the alternate history of "Screambrook" leads to Wyatt having the body of a raccoon.
- My Little Phony: Zed's favorite show during his childhood was My Tiny Horseys.
- Mutagenic Food: The soda that caused the zombies in the first place is an interesting case, because it's perfectly harmless when consumed. It's only when drenched on objects and charged by exotic energies, like alien electricity or moonstone power, that it creates monsters, often animating inanimate things into dangerous mutants. Zed lampshades this by questioning why it's still being sold.
- Ninja Pirate Robot Zombie: The "Robot Space Bear" short sees the kids encountering a creature that has a robot head on a bear's body. They argue whether it should be called a "Robot Space Bear", a "Bear Space Robot", or a "Space Robot Bear" (and A-Spen objects to including the word "space" in the name, as they see no indication that it's from outer space.)
- Odd Couple:
- In "Alien vs. Shredator", impulsive and overly-enthusiastic Wynter teams up with the logical and disciplined A-Spen to form a band.
- In "These Boots Were Made for Willa", sour Willa and sweet Bree team up to find a missing pair of boots.
- Our Zombies Are Different: The Zombies of Seabrook are not terribly different from normal humans, other than having a noticeable pallor and green hair.
- Punny Name: In "Screambrook", Addison befriends a pumpkin that she names "Gordon". Because he's a gourd.
- Queer Colors: In "Alien vs. Shredator", A-Spen, who has previously expressed attractions to both Zed and Willa, wears eyeshadow in blue, pink, and purple tones, similar to the colors of the bisexual pride flag. Incidentally, Wynter has eyeshadow in pink, white, and orange, which are similar the colors of the modern lesbian pride flag, but it's not clear whether or not this should be taken as indicative of her sexuality.
- Raising the Steaks: There are zombie animals, with Zoey and Addison running an adoption drive of them in "When Bucky Met Barky".
- A Rare Sentence: "Did a grasshopper just steal my car?!"
- Red Herring: In "These Boots Were Made for Willa", the first clue that Willa and Bree find in their hunt for Willa's missing boots is a gel-like substance that they assume to be hair gel from Bucky, but it turns out he doesn't use hair gel, he uses pomade. Later, they see Bonzo with the laces from Willa's boots and thus assume that he had something to do with their disappearance, but it turns out that he found the laces and had no idea where they'd come from.
- Repression Never Ends Well: "Foul Play" has Addison repeatedly trying to bottle up her stress from being in charge of the school play. She does it so much that she unintentionally releases sparks.
- Serious Business: Cheering, per usual for the franchise. A running gag is the Seabrook High cheer squad being chronically short on pompoms because they keep wearing them out cheering so hard. It's to the point that Principal Lee can no longer spare money from the budget to buy more and the entirety of Seabrook is completely fed up with fundraising, with most of that aimed at Addison in particular. When Zed asks how hard they're cheering Addison replies, "As hard as it takes!" in a demonic voice with the lighting suddenly becoming very sinister.
- Shout-Out: The shorts parody several classic horror movies.
- "Suddenly Seabrook" features Zed, Addison, and Eliza rescuing Bucky from a giant mutated plant.
- In "I Think We're a Clone Now", Addison discovers a mysterious pod in a nearby locker that creates identical but sinister clones of her.
- In "Wynter Transport", Eliza sends Wynter through her new teleporter and a giant cricket comes out, and she assumes that the teleporter must have turned Wynter into the cricket.
- In "Coach's Cat", Coach adopts a strange little creature with very specific dietary instructions that he completely ignores.
- In "Robot Space Bear", the titular bear looks a lot like Ro-Man from the classic B-Movie Robot Monster.
- "The Dining" is a Whole-Plot Reference to The Shining, with Bonzo being driven to obsession by the ghost of Bree's grandma to complete her Unfinished Business. At the end the portrait of Bree's Grandma in the diner changes to her smiling as the episode closes out on a zooming in shot of it.
- The B-plot of "Something to Tok About" borrows heavily from Ghostbusters, with Dae becoming possessed by an Eldritch Abomination that has accidentally been unleashed and which Addison and Zed must contain by zapping the spirit until it retreats into a box.
- Sealed Evil in a Can: In "Something to Tok About", Dae finds a mysterious box in her aunt's shop and decides to do an unboxing video with it. It turns out the box had a malevolent spirit trapped inside, and thus she accidentally unleashes it.
- Skewed Priorities: In "I Think We're a Clone Now", Addison angrily calls out her clones for blowing off all of her extracurriculars so that they could build a death ray and try to take over the world. Zed suggests that maybe she's angry about the wrong thing here.
- Soapbox Sadie: In the new timeline, zombies don't have it so bad anymore, so Eliza has turned her focus towards agitating for more environmental sustainability initiatives in Seabrook.
- Stating the Simple Solution: When trying to deal with the issue of what to do with their clones in "Double Troubled", Zed says it's not like the clones could just go to another town to start their own lives... cue Answer Cut to the clones saying goodbye at a bus stop, everyone having realized they could've actually just done that the whole time instead of fighting over who gets the originals' lives.
- Strange Soda: Seabrook High has banned most brands of soda due to the effects they have on Seabrook's non-human population, and so instead, students are expected to make do with San Saveur and Petite Gout, two French soft drinks that supposedly do not have any adverse effects. The former is, as its name suggests, completely flavorless, while the latter has a taste that vaguely reminds you of a grapefruit that you ate years ago, though it apparently tastes much better if served cold.
- Stupid Sexy Flanders: In the big musical number for "Alien vs. Shredator", Bree, who has a steady relationship with her boyfriend Bonzo, fans herself when Wynter vamps in her direction.
- Technician vs. Performer: In "Alien vs. Shredator", A-Spen and Wynter both try out for the "Bucktaculer". A-Spen's keyboarding technique is highly proficient, but they lack a creative spark. Wynter, on the other hand, is not a particularly skilled guitarist, but she has amazing stage presence and can improvise lyrics quickly. While neither of them manages to win a spot in the show on their own, when they combine their talents, they become "Werewalien", the show's headlining act.
- Tempting Fate: In "Re-Senior Year", Addison signs up for all Alien classes in the hopes that she'll gain some insight into her Alien heritage. A-Spen warns her that Alien classes are beyond the abilities of most humans, but Addison assumes that between her Alien heritage and her crazy work ethic, she'll be able to keep up. She soon finds out that she's very wrong about this.
- Test of Trivia: In "Awootiful Mind", Eliza teams up with Wynter for a trivia contest against Bucky and Jacey, but becomes frustrated when Wynter's lupine brain makes her slow to produce answers, and thus tries to rig up a device that forces Wynter to think in a more linear fashion.
- This Is Gonna Suck: In "Suddenly Seabrook", Bucky is delivering a rant about how Zed, Addison, and Eliza are the most irresponsible people he's ever met when a vine suddenly drops from a nearby vent and coils around his arm. He looks at the vine and sighs in resignation as it yanks him into the vents.
- This Is Reality: "Youngins and Dragons" has Zed dismissing Zoey's plan of bringing their tabletop game to life as not going to work because they live in reality, not a TV show. Everyone present then gives an Aside Glance to the fourth wall.
- Took a Level in Jerkass: In "A Wyatt Place", Wyatt resorts to asking Willa and Bucky for help in asking Eliza out on a date. Unfortunately, between Bucky's egomania and Willa's Jerkass (but otherwise Tsundere) tendencies, the end result is that Wyatt temporarily becomes more aggressive and mean, to the point that he inadvisably picks a fight with the Sasquatch and gets his ass handed to him.
- Two Shorts: Like many other Disney Channel cartoons, every episode is broadcasted in the two-shorts format on TV, unless noted otherwise.
- Un-Paused: In "Catch Meat If You Can", Eliza starts putting together why Wyatt's so reluctant to hunt the Jackalope on behalf of the other wolves. When she finally realizes the truth, she shouts, "You're a VEGE—" and Wyatt immediately slaps a hand over her mouth, interrupting her sentence (and the music that was playing while she was talking), and drags her into another room. When he releases her mouth, she finishes saying, "—TARIAN!" (and the music finishes playing as well).
- Unusual Pets for Unusual People: In this timeline, Wynter has a giant pet cricket named Mr. Paddlesticks (and later a crab-like sea monster named Diane.) Bucky also gets a zombie dog named Barkey and Coach gets a gremlin-like creature named Razzy.
- What Are Records?: In "No Woman BFF'd Behind" Dae brings out a "relic from the 90's" called a magazine. Subverted when Eliza says they know what magazines are and Dae admits she was just doing a bit.
- You Need to Get Laid: A G-rated example occurs at the end of "My Guy Sasquatch", where after watching Wyatt and Eliza awkwardly pretend that their feelings for each other are strictly platonic, Sasquatch says what everyone else in Seabrook has been thinking - that Wyatt and Eliza really need to get over themselves and just date.
- Zombie Apocalypse: Parodied in "I Scream Zoda", where Zed accidentally turns the whole school into soda-crazed zombies when he gets them hooked on a cursed soda.