Ricky (Trailer Park Boys character)
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| Richard/Ricky | |
|---|---|
| First appearance | S01E01 |
| Portrayed by | Robb Wells |
| Episode count | 55 |
| Information | |
| Nickname(s) | Reveen, Ravine |
| Gender | Male |
| Date of birth | 1971 |
| Occupation | Dope grower |
| Family | See below |
| Children | Trinity |
| Address | Sunnyvale Trailer Park |
Ricky is a fictional character on the Canadian television series Trailer Park Boys portrayed by Robb Wells. He is one of the three main characters on the show along with Julian and Bubbles.
[edit] Character summary
Ricky enjoys marijuana, hash, alcohol. He is Julian's best friend. Bubbles claims that Ricky taught himself to read (minimally) by working through the instructions on frozen food packages labels so that he could eat. He apparently has Attention Deficit Disorder, which would cause his restlessness.
Despite his frequent schemes to get rich quick, he is not very intelligent, possibly due to having only a Grade 10 education, which he earned at the end of Season Two. At the end of Season Seven, he has earned his Grade 11 (while serving a month-long sentence in a Maine jail; the tests were much easier in the United States than they were in Canada). Due to his his limited education as well as extensive alcohol and drug use, Ricky is known to use malapropisms dubbed Rickyisms by fans. Some of his more famous lines include "worst case Ontario" rather than "worst case scenario", "a toad oh so" instead of "I told you so", saying "denial and error" when the proper phrase is "trial and error", and pronouncing jalapeño phonetically as if the word were a part of the english language. For many years (well into adulthood) he believed that God and Santa Claus were one and the same; Ricky referred to them both as "The Big Guy" and failed to distinguish between God from Santa because both a) were associated with Christmas, and b) always knew whether he had been good or bad.
Despite his educational and linguistic shortcomings, Ricky is an accomplished illicit horticulturist and has grown and sold large crops of hydroponic marijuana. In school, he excelled at biology and science, due to his horticultural readings. He is also an expert at talking his way out of trouble with the law. Often, he will trick the police and his victims into helping him physically carry the things he plans to steal. Once, while preparing an illegal massage parlour, he stole office furniture in plain sight of its occupants by claiming he would be delivering new furniture for them. In the movie, he almost escaped being caught after stealing cigarettes from a smoke shop by claiming he and Julian (whom he claimed was deaf and mute) were the window cleaners, but his cover was blown when Julian forgot to keep silent.
One running gag on the show is that at some point or another, Ricky gets shot or injured under embarrassing circumstances. In the season four episode "Working Man", he gets shot by the SWAT team after a faulty security check leads them to believe that their guns are aimed at Mr. Lahey; gets shot in the behind accidentally by Trinity when she handles a gun he left lying around; accidentally shot himself in the foot when stealing some stereo equipment from a warehouse with Cory and Trevor when they were trying to escape a guard dog, shot during a shootout with the owner of the riding mower they were stealing to pay a debt to Sam Losco for stitching Ricky up, and shot in the arm by an arrow by Lahey.
Ricky often uses his own caustic brand of anti-humour knock-knock jokes with an insulting, expletive-filled punchline, such as "Fuck off." His standard outfit is track pants and a cheap shirt that is often the same for an entire season. This is backed up by the statement that he has worn it for a little under two years. As a season progresses, he may hold his shirt together with duct tape. He is addicted to smoking cigarettes. In one episode, he uses nicotine patches to quit with his nine year-old daughter, Trinity, who also was addicted. (It didn't work; he was smoking while wearing multiple patches.) In one episode of season 4, he was smoking three cigarettes at once.
Although he is generally a selfish individual, Ricky tries to be a good father to his daughter Trinity, even trying to "go straight" and get an honest job as a mall security guard to be with her and Lucy, despite the misery it caused him. He even went so far as to literally kiss Mr. Lahey's ass when he used the money he was going to use to buy a trailer with to buy Trinity a set of encyclopedias to help her with her schoolwork-his deal with Lahey being that if he didn't have the money, he would kiss Lahey's ass. Ricky is also a greatly devoted son to his delinquent father Ray, who for his part is invariably selfish, although he reciprocates Ricky's affection.
His diet consists mainly of alcohol, chicken chips, chicken fingers, pepperoni, donairs (from King of Donair), and jalapeño potato chips (which he pronounces "ja-LAP-a-no"), all dressed potato chips (which he calls "Dressed All Over") and zesty cheese tortilla chips (which he calls "Zesty Mordant," a send-up of bilingual packaging in Canada, where the French term for 'Zesty' is 'Mordant' and is displayed side by side on the packaging).
Most of the time Ricky lives in an old Chrysler New Yorker donated to him by Julian known as the Shit-mobile, which is missing its passenger-side front door, the driver's side door does not open, has a severely damaged gear box, numerous scratches and dents along with a very bad paint job. The reason he lives in it is because he doesn't have to pay lot fees on it. Bubbles commented that the car was originally Julian's "grandmothers'" who used to drive it around the park drunk all the time, smashing into things. ("You think Julian has a drink in his hand all the time?"-Bubbles) This apparently has a bit of a continuity error as the car appears to be in pristine shape in the Christmas special, but by the end of the episode, Ricky has caused a lot of damage of the car, including the loss of the passenger door. When he's not committing crimes and smoking dope, Ricky works part time as a garbage collector picking up garbage around the park, playing video games with the boys, and making out with Lucy. Due to his body odour, combined with the garbage and Lucy's reluctance to continue their relationship, he must wait until the smell wears off before he can come in her trailer.
Ricky has also been notorious for kidnapping people and forcing them to do his dirty work. Among the many hostages he has held includes Canadian musicians Alex Lifeson of Rush (after he refused to give them tickets to the concert and Ricky insisted on a private show at the trailer park), and Rita MacNeil (whom he kidnapped, along with her band, forcing them to harvest his marijuana crop at gunpoint). According to Ricky, his birthday is sometime in the spring of 1971, and the fact that he conceived Trinity at 24, which would place his age around 36. He is sometimes maliciously nicknamed "Reveen" after resembling Canadian hypnotist Peter Reveen "the Impossiblist", an identification which he can't stand. He does not like this too much, often getting extremely upset and leading to more swearing and violence. In the episode with Conky, the puppet Conky calls him Reveen. He almost shoots Conky who is controlled by Bubbles. Luckily Julian in his great wisdom stops this from happening (only to shoot Conky himself less than a minute later under similar circumstances). This shows Ricky's lack of thinking things through. He personally considers his lack of thinking an actual life saver at times. In the last episode of season 5, he has a heart attack but does not die, thanks to Lahey's administering of CPR. He later claims that his absence of thinking saved his life, because his non-thinking brain does not need that much oxygen.
Unlike Julian, Ricky prefers using violence to solve conflicts. When threatened, his first reaction is to pull out a gun or begin swinging his fists. He often fights with Randy over trivial matters and even threatened to fight Sarah once. His propensity for violence has been shown in several episodes; in episode 2, "Fuck community College, Let's get drunk and eat chicken fingers", Ricky is living in Julian's car. When his sleep is disturbed by barking dogs, Ricky begins to fire two pistols aimlessly into the night in an attempt to quiet them. In another episode, Ricky's dope crop is threatened by squirrels. When he expresses these concerns to Julian, he hears squirrels nearby and opens fire on them. In the episode "If You Love Something, Set It Free", the boys' dope field is under attack by an unknown entity and Ricky's solution to the problem is to camp out in the field armed with five or ten guns in an attempt to kill the creature, which turns out to be a mountain lion Bubbles adopts, then sets free. Despite this, Ricky is a decent guy with no real badness in him.
Ricky was set on marrying Lucy until the wedding was interrupted by the police. He also had another girlfriend named Sarah, a relationship that ended during one of his many stays in jail. Although married to her in the movie, his relationship with Lucy seems to have ended after she conceived a child with Randy. At first, Ricky was very angry at her for her unfaithfulness, but he realised that he won't have to pay child support and even celebrated by getting drunk. Although Lucy and Randy share joint custody, he admits in a private monologue that he is somewhat upset that the child is not his.
Through all this, Ricky is a very decent man with no real badness in him>
[edit] Jail Count: 21
- 15 unknown charges (It is stated in the season 4 episode "The Green Bastard" that he had been to jail 18 times, with 3 more trips happening after this was stated)
- Season 1, episode 1: Assassination of a dog. The first scene, recorded in black and white, was an excerpt from the original concept of the characters, Ricky and Julian, as pet assassins.
- Season 1, episode 6: Robbing a Grocery Store
- Season 2, episode 7: Driving charges.
- Season 4, episode 8: Possession of drugs while on probation.
- Season 5, episode 10: Possession of firearms.
- Season 7, episode 10: Cruelty to animals and stealing an ATV from forest rangers.
[edit] See also
List of Trailer Park Boys characters
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