Sly Cooper/Characters

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


The Cooper Gang

Our protagonists. They were initially a Trio, but by the third game their ranks had grown to seven.

Sly Cooper

"The Thievius Raccoonus doesn't create great thieves. It takes great thieves to create the Thievius Raccoonus."

An American raccoon, and the last member of an incredibly ancient family of master thieves who preyed upon criminals. His parents were killed by a gang of five criminals when he was young, leaving him to be adopted by the Happy Campers Orphanage, where he meet Bentley and Murray, his lifelong friends and comembers of the Cooper Gang.

  • Ace Pilot: Supposed to be one of these in the third game.
  • Amnesiac Lover: Played with. He fakes amnesia in order to finally to get together with Carmelita.
  • Ancestral Weapon: His cane.
  • Anti-Villain: Type IV.
  • Back Stab: The best way for him to clear out enemy Mooks.
  • Badass
  • Blatant Burglar
  • Calling Card: Literally.
  • Cane Fu
  • The Charmer
  • Conveniently an Orphan: Very much averted. He may be one, but it's a major plot point, and his family play a enormous role in the history of the series as a collective Posthumous Character.
  • Criminal Amnesiac: Inverted and Subverted.
  • Dating Catwoman: His relationship with Carmelita, below.
  • Deadpan Snarker: Dips into this in his conversations.
  • Domino Mask: He has never been seen without it outside of some of his disguises, even as a child, while disguised for Rajan's ball and while faking amnesia to get with Carmelita.
  • Easy Amnesia: Subverted in the ending of the third game. He was only faking amnesia to get with Carmelita.
  • Enemy Mine: With Carmelita during the final level of each game.
  • First-Person Snapshooter: Though one mission involved him posing as a professional one.
  • Gentleman Thief
  • Half-Dressed Cartoon Animal: Maybe. It's possible he's wearing pants, but it's kinda hard to tell.
  • The Hero
  • Hooks and Crooks: His family cane.
  • Honor Before Reason: His main motive, along with the Cooper Family's, for centuries.
  • Never Hurt an Innocent: His family had only gone after other criminals, never an innocent person. Sly is no different.
  • Nice Hat: In the first game, you can even make it into a bomb!
  • One-Hit-Point Wonder: He was this in the first game, and could gain up to 2 extra hitpoints with horseshoes. He gains a health meter in later games.
  • Orphan's Plot Trinket: His cane, the symbol by which the Fiendish Five recognize his identity. It's also the key to the Cooper Vault.
  • Paper-Thin Disguise: When showing up for Rajan's ball, he wears a tuxedo and ditches his hat and shoes, but keeps his mask. In the third game, the fact that he is far less bulky than the Venetian flashlight guards and the Blood Bath Bay lantern-carrying guards he impersonates may explain the constant password requests from the guards. Strangely, his wedding photographer disguise in the same game's fourth level still works even after General Tsao identifies him.
  • Phantom Thief
  • Power-Up Magnet: One of Sly's unlockable abilities in the first game.
  • Rascally Raccoon: Obviously.
  • Rolling Attack: One of his unlockable special moves in the first game.
    • Shock and Awe: And later he gets an upgrade that allows him to channel electricity while rolling.
  • Star-Crossed Lovers: Him and Carmelita. It's played with in the first game with Carmelita's Mercy Lead, and he is rescued by his friends just as Carmelita was about to break out a glass of wine for the occasion of his arrest with him. In the third game, he fakes amnesia after being injured by Dr M. and ends up with Carmelita in Paris.
  • Stealth Hi Bye: He's a master at this. Somehow, he's been able to: handcuff Carmelita to a rail after the ten-second head start, taking 9 to get to her and one more to kiss her (on the lips, no less!); escape Rajah's palace and leaving a calling card in her hair; and even escape just as Carmelita wakes up from being possessed by an ancient mask.
  • Super Drowning Skills
  • Sympathetic Criminal: Sly grew up broke and destitute as a rival clan of thieves and scoundrels robbed him of the family birthright. Despite his abysmal upbringing, he raised himself to be a credible and honorable thief whom often only stole from the kinds of people who left him a penniless orphan to start with.
  • Time Master: Downplayed for the most part, but three of the unlockable special moves in the first game were the ability to speed up time (to make long, boring heists and stake-outs go by in a flash), slow down time (in order to more easily dodge traps and security lasers), and stop time (causing all enemies to freeze for a few seconds).
  • Took a Level in Badass: See One-Hit-Point Wonder.
  • Villain Protagonist: Although a Gentleman Thief who specializes in stealing from the corrupt and decadent for a living. He is still on the opposite ends of the law due to committing crimes as a family pastime.
  • Visible Invisibility: Type 3 while utilizing the invisibility power from his ancient Egyptian ancestor.

Bentley Turtle

An American turtle, and the brains of the Cooper Gang. He appeared solely in radio comms and in a hacking level in the first game, then Took a Level in Badass and played an active role in the second and third games.

Murray Hippo

An American hippo, and The Big Guy of the team. He plays a supporting role as a truck racer and key retriever in the first game, and takes about 10 levels in badass into the second and third games.


The Guru

An Australian koala and aboriginal guru. He joins the team after the Cooper Gang defeat the Mask of Dark Earth and clear Ayers Rock of miners.


Penelope Mouse

A Dutch mouse, and an expert RC vehicle operator, mechanic, and pilot. She joins the team after being exposed as the Black Baron in the ACES Dogfighting Championship, an identity she had created due to age restrictions on dogfighting.


The Panda King

A Chinese panda, a former member of the Fiendish Five, and a powerful Chinese crime lord with a thing for fireworks. He returned in the third game to team up with Sly to rescue his daughter and break into the Cooper Vault, facing demons both literal and metaphorical in the process.

  • Anti-Hero: Type IV in the third game.
  • Calling Your Attacks: Palms of Thunder! Booming Chop! Fiery Wheel!
  • Charged Attack: His fireworks in the third game. A fully charged attack leads to a small scale Macross Missile Massacre.
  • The Dragon: Arguably, to Clockwerk.
  • Easily Forgiven: Averted. Sly never forgives him for his part in his family's murder, he just decides to move on.
  • Enemy Mine: With Sly, against General Tsao, in the third game's fourth level.
  • Enemy Within: In the third game, he is initially trapped in a loop of his greatest loss (with some help from General Tsao) and, during the mission where he destroys the grasshopper crypt, argues with one side of his personality to let Sly Cooper live. He eventually states that Cooper lives, stating to his dark side that if evil and cruelty was needed, then he'd be no less than Taso himself.
  • Even Evil Has Loved Ones: He has a daughter, Jing King, who is kidnapped by General Tsao to be forced into a wedding ceremony.
  • Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep"/Only One Name: Intriguingly, it appears King is his actual surname. Whether "Panda" is his first name is unknown.
  • Freudian Excuse: As a child, he watched the fireworks the noblemen put on for display and aspired to be a fireworks artist himself. However, his skills were spurned by them, causing him to turn to a life of crime.
  • Heel Face Turn: The third game.
  • Incendiary Exponent: His Flame Fu in the first game.
  • I Owe You Shotgun: Murray states that Panda King has shotgun[1] for a month.
  • Kick the Dog: Him burying a village in the snow for refusing to pay his protection fee in the first game.
    • Not just A village; ANY village who didn't pay the protection fee got this.
  • Large and In Charge: When he was a crime lord.
  • Maniac Monkeys: Pretty much all his henchmen in the original game where these.
  • Odd Friendship: With both Murray and the Guru. He relates with the Guru because, as Sly puts it, 'put it off with the old guy', and Murray -- when the hippo states that he'd never abandon the team van again when it was frozen in ice -- because it tore his heart due to the fact that if he had that strength, Jing King wouldn't be forced into marriage.
  • Overprotective Dad: Became this since Jing King begged him to not have another General Tsao incident; he's done a pretty good job, since she hasn't been married yet.
  • Pandaing to the Audience


Dimitri Lousteau

"My suit is GREASY SWEET!"

A French iguana, literal lounge lizard, and former Klaww Gang member, French crime boss, and nightclub/restaurant owner who ran a forging and drug dealing operation. He was defeated by Sly and imprisoned by Interpol, only to be broken out a year later in Venice, lead Sly to the flight roster in Holland, and team up with him to retrieve his family's diving gear from Captain LeFwee in Blood Bath Bay.

Sly: I have NO idea what you're saying. (beat) And your suit sucks.
Dimitri: (gasps) LET'S DANCE!

  • Jive Turkey: Justified, seeing as he learned his English from hip hop videos.
  • Meaningful Name: Lousteau sounds like Cousteau as in Jacques Cousteau, who invented scuba gear.
  • No Name Given: In the second game, he is known only as Dimitri and called Dimitri L. on his arrest card. In the third game, his family name, Lousteau, is revealed.
  • Took a Level in Badass/Le Parkour: If the E3 2011 trailer for the fourth Sly game is any indication, as he was able to convincingly pose as Sly, though that might just have been the Rule of Funny in effect.


The Fiendish Five

A gang of five criminals who broke into Sly's home and killed his parents, dividing the parts of the Thievius Racoonus among themselves and taking off to the furthest corners of the world. Tropes involving them:


Clockwerk

"Clockwerk is superior!"

"Perfection has no age."

The leader of the Fiendish Five, a mysterious robotic owl of unknown origin who turned himself into a robot in order to hunt down and destroy the Cooper family, his greatest rival. He is at least 3200 years old, showing up even in the earliest parts of the Thievius Racoonus. He possessed an incredibly well fortified hideout in the Krakarov Volcano in Russia, before being defeated by Sly and his parts sent to a museum in Cairo. But then the Klaww Gang stole his body parts and repurposed them for their criminal schemes. The Cooper Gang gathered up each of these parts, which were then taken by Jean Bison after the Winter Games and passed on to Arpeggio as part of an Evil Plan to acquire all the parts for himself to acquire immortality through a complex scheme involving the operations of all the other gang members. However, Neyla betrayed Arpeggio and took the Clockwerk frame for herself, being defeated by the Cooper Gang. Clockwerk was eliminated forever, though at the cost of Murray's morale and Bentley's ability to walk.

Sly:"Is it inappropriate to refer to him as a monster? No. Not at all."


Mz. Ruby

An alligator of possibly Haitian nationality, the chief mystic of the Fiendish Five, and an accomplished wielder of black magics, whose command of forces beyond this world allow her to break both the laws of man and nature. She is based in the deepest, darkest parts of the Haitian jungle.


Muggshot

An American bulldog with a serious inferiority complex who once had total control of Mesa City, Utah, until the Cooper Gang took him down. He returns to threaten the gang again in Holland, but is taken out by a combination of Penelope's RC skills, Bentley's defense systems, Murray's strength, Sly's guile, and Carmelita's shock pistol.


Sir Raleigh

The Fiendish Five's chief machinist, an aristocratic Briton who, bored with the high life, took up piracy on a whim and found it to his liking, setting up a shipwrecking operation on an island off the coast of Wales using a weather machine.

"Allow me to make make amends by, what? BLOATING TO GARGANTUAN SIZE AND SQUASHING YOU LIKE THE INSIGNIFICANT BUG THAT YOU ARE!"


The Klaww Gang

A group of five powerful crime lords and a powerful Interpol official from across the world, united for mutual profit, particularily through the spice trade. Tropes related to them:


Arpeggio

A British parrot with great wealth and an enormous airship. The machinist of the Klaww Gang, and arguably its leader.

  • Affably Evil
  • Big Bad: Of the second game. Or so it would appear.
  • Evil Brit
  • Evil Is Stylish
  • Freudian Excuse: He was born a genius, but was never able to fly or keep up with the other students physically. This is part of the reason he seeks the Clockwerk frame, the other being immortality.
  • High-Class Glass
  • Immortality Immorality
  • Minor Major Character: His initial appearance is a non-speaking role at the party in Rajan's "ancestral palace", while his second and final appearance is a scene near the end of the game, where he reveals his master plan to hypnotize Paris using hypnotic lights devised by the Contessa and powered by Jean Bison's Northern Lights battery to send a Paris addled by spice sold by Dimitri, delivered by Jean Bison, and produced by Rajan into a hate frenzy, in order to make himself immortal and able to fly using the Clockwerk frame. However, he is betrayed by Neyla, and (apparently) dies soon afterwards.
  • Only One Name
  • The Unfought


Jean Bison

A Canadian Bison and former prospector and woodsman who was frozen in a freak avalanche for 100 years and unfrozen by global warming, bringing his Saruman-like aspirations of taming the wild north into the modern age.

Jean-Bison: "I wouldn't expect one of your kind to understand the finer points of commerce. You turtles are too stew-pid to know a woodcutter from a woodchuck!"
Bentley: "That's it! Time I showed you just how "stew-pid" we turtles really are!"

Bison: "Come on in here boys! Let's get this varmint."


The Contessa

A Slavic (likely Czechoslovakian) spider and senior Interpol official who is secretly brainwashing prisoners to tell her the location of their loot so she can take it for herself.


Rajan

An Indian spice lord and tiger who ships his spice to Jean Bison, and purchases an "ancestral palace" to further his pretension of royalty. He is, in actuality, a former street urchin who made it rich through drug smuggling.

Rajan: "Defend your lord!"


Other Characters

Carmelita Montoya Fox

"I'll find you, Cooper! I'll be seein' ya soon, ringtail..."

Sly's eternal opponent. An Interpol policewoman and Hispanic fox, his relentless pursuer (in more than one sense) and frequently the one to bust the episode's villain and take the credit.

Barkeley

Carmelita's superior. Not much is known about him, other than his terrible taste in fashion and fondness for cigars. He appears a few times in the background, as well as some supplementary comic strips released around the time of Sly 3.


Neyla

A wily Indian tigress who acquired a scholarship in England after being discovered to have set up a ring of her friends to do her work for her. A powerful opponent, with both strength and guile.


Dr. M

A mandrill of unknown nationality who used to be The Smart Guy of the Cooper Gang, when Sly's father headed it. After Sly's father's death, he tried to claim the Cooper treasure as his own, spending decades trying to open it and building one of the most secure fortresses in the world on Kaine Island, in the South Pacific.


Don Octavio

An Italian lion and former opera singer who turned to a life of crime after rock and roll supplanted his career just as it was getting off the ground. He runs a powerful Mafia operation in Venice, virtually controlling entire neighbourhoods.


Mask of Dark Earth

An ancient and evil spirit mask than can possess its victims, enlarging them and giving them super strength while giving the mask control over them.


The Black Baron

A master aviator who owns a castle in Holland, a whole town, and a whole stadium for dogfighting. He turns out to be an alias for Penelope.

"Earn your pay, you clods!"

"Pugilism is my passion!"


General Tsao

A powerful northern Chinese warlord and chicken from an ancient line of warlords, with power over dark magic and an aspiration to merge his bloodline with the Panda King's through marrying.

  • 0% Approval Rating: None of his subjects are sad to see him go.
  • Authority Equals Asskicking: At least, that's what he believes.
  • Black Magic: The vampires and the giant dragon Sly fights with.
  • Chinese Vampire: He summons praying mantis ones.
  • Everything Is Messier With Pigs: His basic thugs. Different from The Black Baron's own.
  • Everything's Better with Chickens
  • Eviler Than Thou: To the Panda King.
  • Jerkass: Even Muggshot, who has a Freudian Excuse, a hesitancy to attack a crippled Bentley, and loves his mama, pales in comparison to him.
  • I Have You Now, My Pretty: Does this with Jing King.
  • Kick the Dog: Parodied. Bentley observes he saw him kick a puppy twice while he was under Bentley's surveillance. Played more straight in two other cases, both involving Jing King. These are: locking her in his palace and not letting her come out till wedding night despite her tearful pleas, and for the latter, see Politically-Incorrect Villain.
  • Magic Knight: Leans more towards martial attacks.
  • Maniac Monkeys: His other basic thugs. They are also a Palette Swap of Rajan's.
  • Obfuscating Stupidity: At first, he seems to be an idiot in a high position. It turns out he's much, much smarter than that. He actually saw through Sly's disguise, found the gang's hideout, and stole Bentley's computer. Bentley doesn't even realize until he's watching the slides of photos during the mission briefing, in a case of Fridge Logic.
  • Politically-Incorrect Villain: On Jing King: "She's a woman. She doesn't know up from down." To which Sly replies "She's a person, not property", a heck of a statement for a universe where female police officers' uniforms are practically Stripperiffic.
  • Punny Name: His name is a pun on General Tso's chicken, a Chinese chicken dish.
  • Smug Snake: A particularly nasty example thereof. He straddles the line between this trope and Complete Monster.
  • Swiss Army Weapon: His weapon of choice is a combination of a shield and a circular saw.
  • Wire Fu: A duel between him and Sly features them leaping between bamboo shoots in this manner. Hand waved by Bentley as a manifestation of the "fight energy" from past battles in the area.


Captain LeFwee

An arrogant, intelligent parrot of unknown origin, terming himself "The Smartest Man On The Seven Seas". Intriguingly, he appears to have a robotic leg. He is the most powerful pirate in all of Blood Bath Bay, a technologically backward archipelagic region known as the most lawless place on Earth.

Back to Sly Cooper
  1. ↑ in the newly recovered team van
  2. ↑ For those who don't know, the art style is him swinging from a rope and painting.
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