Breakfast Food Killer
From Drawn Together Wiki
| Breakfast Food Killer | |
| | |
| Season/Episode | Season 3 Episode 10 |
| Production Code | 312 |
| OriginalAirdate | October 18, 2007 |
| Guest Voices | Jason Huber as Franken Berry and Sugar Bear |
| Written By | Josh Lieb |
| Directed By | Peter Avanzino |
| Previous Episode | Charlotte's Web of Lies |
| Next Episode | Drawn Together Babies |
"Breakfast Food Killer" is the thirty-second episode of Drawn Together.
Contents |
[edit] Storyline
After Quackers, the mascot of Quackers cereal, is killed while trying to collect a series of five golden UPC codes from boxes of cereal, characters everywhere audition to be his replacement, including the Drawn Together cast. Toot wins the part, but almost immediately has the role taken from her when Wooldoor enters and instantly impresses the judges so much that he is given the job on the spot. Franken Berry, the leader of the cereal mascots, takes Wooldoor to the breakfast food club and introduces him to all the other mascots. Toot, who is also attending the party, swears revenge, but gets intoxicated and passes out.
The next morning, Toot wakes up to find that Quackers is still alive. He gives her the four golden UPC codes and tells her to find the last one so she can obtain the key to bringing down the cereal empire. Toot tells her housemates, but none of them believe her, thinking she is jealous of Wooldoor (who is now addicted to cereal as if it's an illicit drug). Toot tries to prove she is telling the truth by taking them to see Quackers's body, only to discover that Franken Berry has already moved it. She stays up that night to uncover the mystery, but is distracted by a noise from downstairs. It turns out to be a cat, but suddenly a cereal mascot (who resembles Lucky of Lucky Charms) appears and attempts to interrogate her about the location of the other four UPC codes, but to no avail. He tries to asphyxiate her, but during the struggle, the two accidentally trigger a trap designed to protect Foxxy's Funyuns. Foxxy bursts in and saves Toot, causing the mascot to commit suicide by ingesting a cyanide piece of breakfast cereal. Foxxy then agrees to help Toot uncover the mystery.
The two go to the cemetery to get the last UPC code from General Mills, which they are able to obtain through infiltrating his tomb. Franken Berry sees this though a bowl of Froot Loops, and sends his henchmen (the Soggies) to kill Toot; Wooldoor overhears the plan, but Franken Berry brainwashes him to keep him quiet. Foxxy and Toot escape the Soggies with the help of Foxxy's reckless driving and Toot's fighting skills, and Toot manages to put the envelope containing the five UPC codes in the mailbox. Six to eight weeks later, the mail finally comes; Toot and Foxxy get the prize, and then escape by getting into a cab driven by Ling-Ling. They find out that Franken Berry's lair is in Africa, where he is holding thousands of African children as slaves to dig his cereal mine. The group is confronted by Franken Berry and Wooldoor, who is now nearly completely brainwashed, though he manages to snap out of it when he realizes the wrongs he is doing. He attacks the Soggies and Franken Berry, giving Toot enough time to destroy the lair. Franken Berry offers Toot her own cereal if she stops, but Toot declines, citing the fact that she's "far too vindictive". The entire mine explodes, killing Ling-Ling and the slavers; however, Toot, Foxxy, Wooldoor, and the African children manage to escape unharmed. The Africans are at first happy, but suddenly realize that with the mine gone, they're no longer going to be making three cents an hour and as a result their families will all starve. Wooldoor thanks Toot and Foxxy for rescuing him. Toot announces that now that she has brought down the cereal empire, she's going to take on the breakfast burrito people next. She escapes by firing a grappling hook into the sky, which catches the wing of a passing plane; however, moments later, she is crushed when the plane falls out of the sky and lands on her.
Musical number: The theme song from the sitcom Good Times plays twice in the episode: first during the montage where Toot remembers Quackers, and later when Toot and Foxxy discover Captain Hero having sex with General Mills's corpse. "The Best Time of Your Life", the theme song from the Carousel of Progress attraction at Walt Disney World, plays three times, in each instance being used to facilitate a quick transition from one scene to the next.
[edit] Notes and inside references
- The images of Toot and Wooldoor on the two cereal boxes are both amalgams of the two characters: Wooldoor's box features Wooldoor with Toot's hair and outfit, while Toot's box features Toot with Wooldoor's outfit, nose, and bat wings.
- The children in the Quackers commercial are voiced by James Arnold Taylor and Abbey McBride.
- The newscaster, General Mills, and Dig 'Em are all voiced by Jess Harnell.
- James Arnold Taylor voices both Richard "Boner" Stabone and Violent Retard. He and Harnell also voice the two gravediggers.
- Pop's wife Jewel is voiced by Cree Summer.
- Lining up for the mascot auditions, in addition to the housemates themselves, are a number of characters from previous episodes, including Strawberry Sweetcake and Speedy Gonzales from "The One Wherein There Is a Big Twist, Part II", the talking banana from "Freaks & Greeks", Malcolm Exposition from "Terms of Endearment", and Blue Ball from "Hot Tub".
- Neither Clara nor Xandir has any dialogue in this episode. This is the first time a character other than Ling-Ling has appeared in an episode without dialogue since Toot in "Foxxy vs. the Board of Education". According to DVD commentary, the episode originally featured a B-story in which the characters who were not involved in the main story (Clara, Xandir, Spanky, and Hero) were practicing for a cheerleading competition; the story ended up being cut, and as a result, Hero and Spanky only have a few lines of dialogue while Clara and Xandir end up having no lines at all.
- Spanky's speech about UPC codes contains a number of factual errors. He states that UPC codes were suggested by Wallace Fritz in 1922; the proponent was actually named Wallace Flint, and he suggested them in 1932. Additionally, Spanky says that UPC stands for "Uniform Product Code". It actually stands for "Universal Product Code".
- Spanky chides Franken Berry (formerly Frankenstein) for rejecting his Jewish heritage, then notes, "Assimilation is our people's greatest enemy". This implies that Spanky was Jewish prior to his conversion to Islam.
- This episode marks the culmination of a running gag in which Foxxy has trouble remembering her housemates' names. She refers to Toot as "Tooky" and Wooldoor as "Mapplethorpe", after which Toot asks her why she doesn't know their names. In "Lost in Parking Space, Part One", she referred to Toot and Wooldoor as "Ploop" and "Wooldorf", respectively; later in this episode, she refers to Wooldoor as Wooldorf once again. She also called Toot "Took" in "Wooldoor Sockbat's Giggle-Wiggle Funny Tickle Non-Traditional Progressive Multicultural Roundtable!". In the previous episode, "Charlotte's Web of Lies", Foxxy referred to Xandir as "Xylophone".
- Foxxy states that Franken Berry's use of children as slave labor is more shameful than the government's refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement among nations to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. In reality, the United States has signed the agreement, though as of the episode's airdate, they have not yet ratified it.
- At the end of the episode, Wooldoor thanks Foxxy and Toot for rescuing "an old Sockbat like me". This mirrors the end of "Alzheimer's That Ends Well", when Toot thanked her housemates for rescuing "an old broad like me".
- According to DVD commentary, this is James Arnold Taylor's favorite episode.
- This is the second episode not to contain any confessional segments; the first was "A Very Special Drawn Together Afterschool Special".
- Toward the end of the episode, the animation briefly changes to stick figure.
[edit] Animated cameos
- A number of cereal mascots are featured in this episode, including Franken Berry, Frosted Flakes mascot Tony the Tiger, Cocoa Puffs mascot Sonny the Cuckoo Bird (in a straitjacket, as he was when he appeared previously in "Foxxy vs. the Board of Education"), the Trix rabbit, Golden Crisp mascot Sugar Bear, Buzz the Honey Nut Cheerios bee, Rice Krispies mascots Snap, Crackle, and Pop, Cap'n Crunch and his nemeses The Soggies, Honey Smacks mascot Dig 'Em, and an evil version of Lucky Charms mascot Lucky.
- In addition to Speedy Gonzales (see Notes and inside references above), the silhouettes of several famous animated characters can be seen lining up for the mascot auditions, including a transformer, Bender, Harley Quinn, Mickey Mouse, and He-Man.
- The donkey jumping and shouting "Baba Booey" during the mascot auditions is Baba Looey, the sidekick of Quick Draw McGraw.
[edit] Cultural references
- The title of this episode is a pun on the term "serial killer", "serial" being a homophone of "cereal".
- Quackers, the mascot of Quackers cereal, is a parody of Daffy Duck.
- The cloaked figure who has Quackers murdered- later revealed to be Franken Berry- is based on Palpatine from the Star Wars franchise.
- During the mascot auditions, Baba Looey jumps up shouting, "Baba Booey", the nickname of Gary Dell'Abate, producer of The Howard Stern Show.
- It is announced that when Quackers's replacement is chosen, it will be signalled by rainbow smoke rising from a house's smokestacks. This is a reference to the white smoke used to signify that a new Pope has been elected.
- In the scene where Wooldoor runs into Boner from Growing Pains while looking for the mascot auditions, the two have a conversation offscreen wherein they have difficulty distinguishing the shows Small Wonder and Out of This World, both of which were sitcoms with science fiction elements that aired in first-run syndication in the late 1980s. Small Wonder was about a little girl who was actually an android; Out of This World was about a teenage girl whose father was an alien, and who possessed supernatural powers such as the ability to stop time.
- As stated in the dialogue itself, the party scene where Wooldoor meets the other cereal mascots is a parody of the film Boogie Nights. Just as Toot claims, the dialogue is taken virtually word-for-word, and some of the characters' costumes are even drawn to mimic the clothing worn by the actors in the pool scene (e.g., Franken Berry is suddenly wearing a scarf and red suit, Cap'n Crunch wears orange sunglasses, etc.). The song playing during the scene is a parody of Three Dog Night's "Mama Told Me Not to Come", the song that played during the scene in the original film.
- After Wooldoor shows the housemates his cereal box, Foxxy says to a jealous Toot, "Can't you just be happy for Mapplethorpe?", a reference to controversial photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
- The fifth UPC code is hidden in General Mills's tomb. This is a dual reference to General Mills, the cereal manufacturer, and Grant's Tomb.
- The scene where General Mills challenges Foxxy and Toot to answer his question is based on the game show Family Feud.
- The DVD version of this episode contains a scene where General Mills's statue warns Foxxy and Toot that if they fail to answer his question correctly, they'll end up "like THEM", then points to two shadowy figures who appear to have been hanged; however, they are merely hanging their heads in disappointment that they got their question wrong. One of the men holds a board game called "General Mills' Tomb", a reference to how game shows often give away board game versions of the show to losing contestants as parting gifts. The two men are voiced by creators Dave Jeser and Matt Silverstein.
- The statue's pedestal bears a plaque reading "Cheerio cruel world", a combination of the British greeting "Cheerio" and the expression "Goodbye cruel world", and in keeping with the episode's cereal theme, a pun on the cereal Cheerios.
- The Soggies, the cereal empire thugs, are able to become translucent and move through objects exactly as the Twins from The Matrix Reloaded could. The fight scene on top of the van is taken directly from the film.
- When the Soggies chase Foxxy and Toot off a cliff, the two freeze in midair while Foxxy holds up a sign saying, "Oh Lordy!", after which they immediately fall. This is a parody of a gag featured in several Looney Tunes cartoons, usually involving Wile E. Coyote.
- The scene where Ling-Ling drives Toot and Foxxy to Africa, as well as the ensuing mine scenes, parody the film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, with Ling-Ling as Short Round, Foxxy as Willie Scott, and Toot as Indiana Jones.
- The giant honeycomb at the end is a reference to Honey Comb cereal.
- While running away from the marshmallow boulder, Foxxy says she'll be the first girl killed by a big fat marshmallow since the Chappaquiddick. This refers to a 1969 incident where Senator Ted Kennedy drove his car off a bridge near Chappaquiddick Island, resulting in the death of his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne.
| Drawn Together |
|---|
| Characters |
| Captain Hero • Foxxy Love • Ling-Ling • Princess Clara • Spanky Ham • Toot Braunstein • Wooldoor Sockbat • Xandir |
| Episodes |
| Season One: 1 • 2 • 3 • 4 • 5 • 6 • 7
Season Two: 8 • 9 • 10 • 11 • 12 • 13 • 14 • 15 • 16 • 17 • 18 • 19 • 20 • 21 • 22 Season Three: 23 • 24 • 25 • 26 • 27 • 28 • 29 • 30 • 31 • 32 • 33 • 34 • 35 • 36 |
| Gags |
| Running gags • Housemate deaths • Fourth wall breaks • Censored/Uncensored Game |
| Cast and creators |
| Dave Jeser • Matt Silverstein • Adam Carolla • Jess Harnell • Abbey McBride • Jack Plotnick • Tara Strong • Cree Summer • James Arnold Taylor |
