Alzheimer's That Ends Well

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“Alzheimer's That Ends Well”
Drawn Together episode
Image:dtalzheimers1.jpg
Episode no. Season 2
Episode 14
Guest stars Jimmy Kimmel as Old Man
Chris Edgerly
Debi Mae West as Vajoana and Old Woman
Written by Elijah Aron
Directed by Rich Moore
Production no. 211
Original airdate March 8, 2006
Episode chronology
← Previous Next →
"A Very Special Drawn Together Afterschool Special" "The Drawn Together Clip Show"

"Alzheimer's That Ends Well" is the twenty-first episode of the animated series Drawn Together.

Contents

[edit] Storyline

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The story begins with Clara depressed that her Octopussoir keeps interfering with her life, sprouting out and making people vomit. She then is told that she can get an Extreme Vaginal Makeover, under the care of the esteemed Dr. Wooldoor Sockbat. It goes fairly well, but Clara soon becomes obsessed with what she perceives as flaws in the vagina, which she keeps demanding be fixed. After it reaches the point where more plastic surgery is impossible, she is shocked to find it looks like Joan Rivers (and talks like her too). The only possibility to get rid of her "va-Joan-a" (that won't make it resemble Kevin Spacey's vagina) is to reinstall the Octopussoir. However, when she goes to find the Octopussoir again, she discovers he is happy now, having completed college, become a realtor, and married a 38-year-old Jewish woman (who will marry anything). He explains to Clara that the reason her plastic surgery went wrong was because she, unlike him, used it too much.

Meanwhile, Toot is depressed that the housemates have forgotten her birthday. After they discover her trying to kill herself, they throw her a party. When she acts surprised, they begin to wonder if her mind is all there, and realizing that she is from the 1920s, hastily conclude that she is elderly and has developed Alzheimer's disease. They decide that she is a terrible burden on the household, and put her in a nursing home. At first, Toot is horrified when she sees all the old people acting like insane mental patients, and insists she doesn't belong there. However, when the attendants are gone, the seniors let her in on a secret: there is no such disease as Alzheimer's. Old people simply fake the disease to get into luxurious nursing homes where they are waited on hand and foot. Toot decides she likes this life, and eagerly plays along. While she is talking to Xandir on the phone one day, she accidentally reveals the secret, causing the old timers to decide she must die. They give her a new walker that has faulty brakes, causing Toot to fall off the balcony with a fiery explosion. She survives, however, so the seniors gang up on her in a fight. She survives this, too, and finally manages to flee the scene and escape back to the Drawn Together house. The seniors send for bounty hunter Boba Fett to track her down. Once she makes it back to the house, the housemates bring her right back to the home. The old people capture Toot, and force her to walk the plank into the most fearsome and deadly place possible- the nursing home's pool.

Toot in the nursing home.
Toot in the nursing home.

Meanwhile, the housemates find the scooter Toot escaped home in. Spanky hops on to ride it, but ends up being blown to bits; Boba Fett, thinking that Spanky was the "fat pig" the seniors were after, rigged it up as a booby trap. The housemates finally realize Toot is in trouble. They pile into the Foxxy 5 van and break into the pool area where the seniors are holding Toot. The van, with all atop it, is in the pool soon, sinking. The seniors prevent their escape by taking up shuffleboard sticks as weapons and encircling the pool. While this is going on, Clara decides that the va-Joan-a has become an unbearable burden to her, and has come to the home to put it out to pasture. She walks by the pool area and sees the commotion going on. Realizing that there is only one thing to do, she pulls up her dress and lets her va-Joan-a go to work, telling old jokes from her stand-up comedy act, jokes which make the old people laugh so hard, it kills them all one by one. The threat eliminated, Captain Hero takes them all flying home. As they are flying, Clara decides that just as she came to accept her Octopussoir, she can accept the va-Joan-a too- she just wishes she had a way to make it shut up when she needs. When Foxxy hands her a tampon, Clara is delighted, but when she asks how to know when you're supposed to take it out, Foxxy has no idea what she's talking about.

Musical Number: "You'll Really Love Being Abandoned Here", a happy song about retirement home life sung by Toot and the seniors. The song is a parody of "I Think I'm Gonna Like It Here" from Annie.

[edit] Notes and inside references

  • Captain Hero and Xandir are shown taking a bath together and being completely casual about it, marking the beginning of a running gag in which the two are implied to be gay sweethearts. The gag would be continued the following season in "Unrestrainable Trainable" when Xandir is shown wearing the bottoms to Hero's pajamas while Hero wears the tops, and in "Mexican't Buy Me Love" when the two are partnered up on The Newlywed Game.
  • At the beginning of the episode, there is a shot of Clara walking along the beach. When the waves recede, the "beach" washes away to reveal the outside of the Drawn Together house. This joke is referenced again a few moments later when we see Toot walking back to the house carrying a surfboard.
  • Near the beginning of the episode, Xandir is seen reading a magazine called Ex-Box Muncher, a reference to both his status as a video game character (Ex-Box is a pun on the Xbox) and his homosexuality ('ex' meaning 'former', and 'box muncher' being a slang term for a person who practises cunnilingus).
  • Xandir repeatedly addresses Toot as Mrs. Braunstein, despite the fact she is not married.
  • Clara's vagina, the Octopussoir, is revealed to be male (though Wooldoor refers to it as "she" at one point). It is also revealed that Clara has had the Octopussoir since she was a baby, indicating that Clara's mother must have died very soon after she was born, since she already had a stepmother by the time the curse was placed on her. This contradicts what was revealed in "Clara's Dirty Little Secret", when Clara spoke in a manner indicating she actually knew her mother.
  • After Toot escapes a fiery death from the exploding walker, she crawls up onto the balcony with three arms.
  • The door to Dr. Wooldoor Sockbat's office indicates that his doctoral degree is a PhD rather than an MD, which is what he would need to possess in order to practice medicine or perform surgery of any sort. However, earlier in the episode, when "Dr. Wooldoor Sockbat" was first introduced, an on-screen caption identified him as an MD.
  • Wooldoor Sockbat says that the show can't show Clara's new vagina because of the FCC, and when he tries to reveal what FCC stands for, his voice is masked by censoring beeps, and his mouth is pixellated. This is the Drawn Together production team mocking what they perceive as the inconsistent standards of the FCC and network censors.
  • When Toot is shocked out of the bathtub at the beginning of the episode, she has a cow's tail and hooves when she hits the floor and runs; her rear end also has the USDA Stamp of Approval, another bovine gag. She was also depicted with a tail and hooves in "The One Wherein There Is a Big Twist," though in both cases it is a sight gag rather than an intrinsic aspect of the character.
    Octopussoir telling Clara he has moved on.
    Octopussoir telling Clara he has moved on.
  • Clara's Octopussoir marries a 38-year-old Jewish woman, claiming that such a woman "will marry anything". Orthodox Judaism stresses marriage's importance, and many adherents marry young. Thus a 38-year-old Jewish woman would be even more obsessed with marriage than the average 38-year-old. The woman he is shown marrying looks exactly like Unusually Flexible Girl from "Captain Hero's Marriage Pact," another marriage-obsessed Jewish woman. (As UFG's mother is named "Unusually Jewish Woman," UFG would be considered Jewish by traditional standards.) The character here was most likely drawn to resemble UFG as an in-joke, playing on the fact that like UFG, this woman is desperate to marry.
  • Boba Fett is hired to kill Toot, but kills Spanky instead. This is the second time that the word "pig" has been misinterpreted as referring to Spanky in a context where it actually refers to Toot. The first was in "Dirty Pranking No. 2" when the King remembers only that his carriage-jacking was committed by a "pig".
  • When Spanky dies, the explosion throws everyone on top of each other in the order Ling-Ling, Foxxy, Xandir, and Hero. Foxxy falls on top of Ling-Ling, then Xandir falls and lands in front of Foxxy in such a position as to suggest that he is engaging her in oral sex. Next, Captain Hero falls on top of Xandir, landing in such a position as to suggest performing anal sex with Xandir.
  • Jimmy Kimmel guest stars for the second time. Here he is the main male old person, who has the same voice as Elmer Higgins from Crank Yankers (another character voiced by Kimmel).
  • The running joke on Captain Hero's cowardice continues, this time having him wait until after the seniors are dead to gather everyone in his arms and fly off to safety, something he should have been able to do at any time.
  • The vagina metaphors used in this episode include the following: Octopussoir, Temple of Chastity, Thingamagiggy, Whites-Only Drinking Fountain, Pink Sink, Face Flower, Giggy, Crotch Stigmata, Husband Hole, Wormhole to the Crab Nebula, Hairy Hamentaschen, Vajoana, Lox Box, House at Pooh Corner, and Ketchup Dispenser.
    • Additionally, when Wooldoor uses the computer to show Clara possible new vaginas, many of the images he cycles through are literal depictions of slang terms for vagina, including a taco, a jelly donut, a little man in a canoe, a cameltoe, a flower, a box, a beaver, a pair of lips, a vertical smile, and a clam. The sound of a cat screaming accompanies one of the images; though we do not see that particular image on screen, the show is obviously referring to the word "pussy".
  • A major plot point of this episode revolves around the question of Toot's actual age. While the housemates leap to the conclusion that she is elderly because of her 1920s origins, the episode as a whole supports the notion that Toot is actually a fairly young woman as the first season confessional captions indicated. (See Toot Braunstein- Age issues for a more detailed discussion of this issue.)

[edit] Goofs

  • During the scene where Wooldoor and Clara are arguing about suing each other, even though Wooldoor is wearing a labcoat and dress shirt in the scene (as he does through most of the episode), one of the cuts briefly shows Wooldoor in his regular clothes.
  • Toot's shoes are the source of at least two continuity errors in this episode. When the seniors are forcing Toot to walk the plank into the retirement home pool, her right shoe comes off and sinks ominously into the muck. Moments later, both shoes are back on her feet. They also disappear during the fight at the nursing home, then reappear afterward.
  • The old people sometimes have four fingers but other times have five.

[edit] Animated cameos

[edit] Cultural references

Extreme Vaginal Makeover's title screen.
Extreme Vaginal Makeover's title screen.
  • The title is a pun on the phrase "all's well that ends well," which is also the title of a Shakespeare play.
  • Clara mentions that she had to give up her chance of winning a toddler's beauty pageant after the introduction of the "thong competition", a reference to the controversy over provocative costumes worn by young children at such pageants.
  • At certain points in the scene where Ty Pennington arrives in a giant robot to surprise Clara, the camera shows a view from ground level of the robot towering over everyone; these shots are based on the movie The Iron Giant. The robot itself is based on Optimus Prime from The Transformers.
  • The picture that Toot identifies as a vase, and Captain Hero identifies as two people, is a well-known optical illusion known as the Rubin vase; the image that a person sees is said to contain insights into the way the person thinks.
  • The scene where Clara's Octopussoir attacks the doctors is a reference to the scene in Spider-Man 2 where Dr. Octavius's tentacles kill the doctors attempting to operate on him.
  • Clara's obsession with her vagina represents the plastic surgery trend people tend to have over any part of their body (many of her complaints, like pimples or crow's feet, are usually related to the face). The maximum amount of plastic surgery possible turns it into Joan Rivers's face, a crack at her many surgeries.
  • When we first see Clara's new Vajoana, it keeps asking, "Who are you wearing? Who are you wearing?", the question Joan Rivers always asks of celebrities walking the red carpet at the Academy Awards. At one point, Vajoana also says, "Can we talk?", referencing another Rivers catchphrase.
  • The retirement home is called the Golden Sheets, a reference to the many contexts in which the word "golden" is used as a euphemism for old or elderly: i.e. golden years (old age), golden anniversary (50th anniversary), the sitcom The Golden Girls (about four elderly women). It is also likely a crack at the poor bladder control of nursing home residents.
  • When the seniors are pretending to be crazy, one of them imitates Napoleon Bonaparte, referring to the old joke that crazy people always believe themselves to be Napoleon.
  • At one point, Toot is seen gorging herself with both hands and one of her feet while she sits on a bucket labelled KFCC. This is a pun combining the name of the popular fast food chain Kentucky Fried Chicken (who go by the acronym KFC) with the name of the Federal Communications Commission (or FCC), the governing board which regulates television and radio broadcasting. The bucket resembles those in which KFC fried chicken is sold. The initials KFCC were previously used in "Terms of Endearment" when the agents sent to capture Foxxy have emblems reading KFCC on the back of their uniforms.
  • Toot finds that the brakelines of her new walker have been cut, preventing her from stopping (though she could easily stop walking). The walker crashes through a balcony down "a ten foot fall into the 'trampoline garden'", and explodes. This is a parody of the prevalence of explosions in Hollywood movies, particularly in situations that would not generally cause an explosion.
  • The scene where the Foxxy 5 van crashes through the wall of the retirement home is a parody of The Dukes of Hazzard; even the song played (the first few notes of "Dixie") is the same. When the van floats in the pool, it is shown to have a Confederate flag on top, just as the Dukes' car, the General Lee did.
    • This is odd, if one takes into account that Foxxy—and the other members of the Foxxy 5—are all African-American, as the Confederate flag is viewed by many as a racist symbol.
  • When Toot's shoe falls into the muck, it makes a painful squeaking sound while it sinks, similar to the scene in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, when Judge Doom, played by Christopher Lloyd, takes an animated shoe and submerges it in a vat of Dip that kills cartoon characters.
  • The scene where Spanky is killed by the booby trapped scooter Boba Fett rigged up is a parody of numerous movie scenes in which characters are about to start their cars but get out just in time before the car explodes, or where they try in vain to warn someone just before it happens. Examples of movies to use such a device include The Pelican Brief, Casino, and most similar to the parody, The Godfather.
  • When Clara is riding in the taxi, music plays that is similar to the theme music from the series Taxi.
  • In the episode's climactic scene, the va-Joan-a kills the seniors with jokes, parodying the expression "to die laughing". This concept was introduced in a sketch on Monty Python's Flying Circus titled The Killer Joke. The movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit also used a similar parody in the scene where Eddie Valiant kills the toon weasels by making them laugh.
  • After the va-Joan-a makes a joke about Joan Collins, one of the seniors states that he loves jokes about dead celebrities no one cares about anymore, the joke being that Collins is not actually dead.


Preceded by
A Very Special Drawn Together Afterschool Special		 Drawn Together episodes
March 8, 2006		 Succeeded by
The Drawn Together Clip Show
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