Captain Girl

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“Captain Girl”
Drawn Together episode
Image:Tootandbaby.jpg
Episode no. Season 2
Episode 9
Guest stars Paget Brewster as Child Services Woman
Chris Edgerly
Written by Jordan Young
Directed by Dwayne Carey-Hill
Production no. 208
Original airdate February 1, 2006
Episode chronology
← Previous Next →
"Terms of Endearment" "A Tale of Two Cows"

"Captain Girl" is the sixteenth episode of the animated series Drawn Together.

[edit] Storyline

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

As the housemates are enjoying a relaxing day by the pool, Captain Hero suddenly sees the Hero Signal in the sky, but shrugs it off, claiming that if it's important, his new sidekick Captain Girl will page him. His pager then goes off, and Hero is off to the rescue, but later that day, he returns to the house holding what appears to be Captain Girl's bloody uniform. He tells the housemates that Captain Girl has been killed by the evil Mad Libber, and the only clue he has to solve her murder is a note from the Mad Libber. Naturally, the note is in the form of a Mad Lib, which the housemates solve by filling in every blank with the word "penis".

After Captain Girl's funeral, Captain Hero wonders what he'll do for a sidekick. Wooldoor, who has dreamed of being Hero's sidekick ever since he's been in the house with him, asks for the job; Captain Hero, not really feeling like giving the matter much thought, agrees. Although the pair have some success fighting villains, the relationship between Hero and his new sidekick is rather strained, as Wooldoor can't seem to live up to what Captain Hero thinks a sidekick should be. After a cable car full of people crashes into the mountains because of Hero's apathy and Wooldoor's inability to fly, Hero unfairly blames Wooldoor and fires him.

Wooldoor is despondent, but sees a chance to redeem himself when he sees a news crawl at the bottom of the screen that the Mad Libber is causing havoc again. He rushes to the scene, but he is too late; the Mad Libber has already made his getaway, leaving behind another Mad Lib. Wooldoor at first is unable to make heads or tails of the note, but then realizes that if he tries filling it out with words other than "penis", he might be able to solve the case. With Spanky's help, he does just this, although at Spanky's insistence, he leaves one "penis" in the note, because a Mad Lib just isn't a Mad Lib without the word "penis" appearing at least once. The finished note tells Wooldoor that the Mad Libber is planning to blow up the town's dam, and will detonate the bomb by remote control from the "penis" tower. When Wooldoor finally locates the penis tower, sure enough, the Mad Libber is on the roof, preparing to unleash his evil scheme. He confronts the Mad Libber about the death of Captain Girl, but the Mad Libber informs him that there's no such person; Captain Hero has never had a sidekick because nobody else can stand to work with him. Wooldoor then sees Captain Hero standing off to the side, and Hero steps in to tell him the truth, that he pretended to have a sidekick because he was jealous of all the other superheroes with sidekicks. Even the Mad Libber has a sidekick, a wheelchair-bound quadriplegic man named QuadrapliJack. Wooldoor comforts Captain Hero by offering to be his sidekick again, an offer which Hero gladly accepts. While Hero and Wooldoor are sharing this heartwarming moment together, the Mad Libber flees the scene, but not before he sets off the bomb and blows up the dam, flooding the entire town. Hero and Wooldoor escape from the flood using the QuadrapliJack's wheelchair.

Toot looks for "baby gravy".
Toot looks for "baby gravy".

Meanwhile, a seriously depressed Toot is trying to fill the void in her life with something other than food, and upon seeing a happy young mother, thinks she has found the answer: a baby. She resolves to get herself pregnant, so when none of the other housemates will have sex with her, she gets a black light to detect the presence of semen in the house. The light reveals the entire house (as well as Foxxy and Xandir's bodies) to be covered in the stuff, but finds a veritable gold mine of it in the hot tub. As Toot immerses herself in the hot tub, Foxxy, Clara, and Xandir suggest to Toot that before she gets pregnant, she should try an experiment to see if she is ready for motherhood. After Clara tells Toot about a school project where the kids have to carry eggs around for a week, they give Toot something with which she can try the same experiment—a baby from Nicaragua.

Toot's mothering skills, unfortunately, leave something to be desired, as she spends more time drinking than taking care of the baby. The baby turns out to be a bratty tramp who finally runs away from home. Toot becomes distraught and orders the housemates to go find the baby while she lies by the pool drinking. The baby is found, but not by any of the housemates; a woman from Child Services confronts Toot and tells her that the baby has not only been caught shoplifting, but is pregnant. As Foxxy, Clara, and Xandir gather around the operating table with her, Toot berates the baby harshly for becoming a mother without considering the responsibilities of motherhood, then quickly realizes that is exactly what she herself did. As the baby delivers its own baby, the housemates laugh over the lesson Toot has learned, right before the Child Services woman shows up to take both babies away.

Musical number: "Captain Hero Theme", a parody of the famous Batman theme song.

[edit] Notes and inside references

Toot protects her baby with a circle of fire.
Toot protects her baby with a circle of fire.
  • This episode reveals that Foxxy has had two children taken away by Social Services: Kwametta, whose first mention is in this episode, and Ray-Ray, the child living with her in "Ghostesses in the Slot Machine." The Child Services Woman informs Foxxy they've been renamed Heather and Raymond-Raymond, respectively. With the addition of Timmy, this brings the total number of Foxxy's known children to three.
  • During Captain Girl's funeral, when Toot says she knows the answer to all her problems, an anonymous character shouts "Yeah, ice cream, lardass!" from offscreen. This is the same voice as the one that shouts to Captain Hero that he sucks in the episode "Ghostesses in the Slot Machine," which has been said to be the voice of creator Matt Silverstein.
  • The magazine Captain Hero looks at in this episode is the same one read by the teenager who lost his eyesight due to masturbation in "Clum Babies." Captain Hero even appears to be looking at the exact same page as the teenager did.
  • Tara Strong (who also plays Toot and Clara) plays the voice of Toot's baby, using the exact voice she used for Dil Pickles in the original Rugrats series.
  • Captain Hero announces that Captain Girl is being buried as a Mormon, "not because she was one, but because she hated Mormons and it would make her happy to bury one." This is another example of a Jewish in-joke in the series. The line is a slightly modified version of a joke told in the Jewish community about an old Jewish man converting to Catholicism on his death bed, claiming, "Better one of them should die than one of us!"[1]

[edit] Cultural references

  • Although she turns out to be a fabrication by Captain Hero, the character of Captain Girl is based on a number of female superhero counterparts which were modeled after themselves, such as Supergirl and Batgirl. Like Captain Girl, both heroines met violent fates—Supergirl was killed, and Batgirl was shot and paralyzed.
    Wooldoor in his new role as Captain Hero's sidekick.
    Wooldoor in his new role as Captain Hero's sidekick.
  • Although Captain Hero usually parodies Superman, this episode contains numerous references to Batman.
    • The Captain Hero Signal is based on the Bat-Signal.
    • The title sequence that introduces Wooldoor as Captain Hero's new sidekick while their theme song plays in the background is a parody of the title sequence from the 1960s Batman TV series.
    • Wooldoor's costume is modeled after that of Robin, Batman's sidekick.
    • The Mad Libber, who leaves clues in the form of Mad Libs, is based on Batman's foe, the Riddler, who left clues in the form of riddles.
    • Wooldoor slides down a pole to change into his costume in the same manner as that of Batman and Robin.
  • During the Captain Hero Theme Intro, there is a segment where Captain Hero and Wooldoor turn from the camera and share a kiss in Hero's cape. This could be a reference to numerous jokes that Batman and Robin were secretly gay lovers. Although this rumor followed the pair in both their comic book incarnation and in the TV series, it has been explicitly denied.
    • Also during the Captain Hero Theme Intro, the car Captain Hero tries to break into appears to be a Chrysler 300C, and is similar in design to the Batmobile.
  • Upon losing the "Not-It!" game to decide who would impregnate Toot, Ling-Ling commits seppuku, a Japanese act of ritual suicide, also commonly known as hara-kiri in Western society. He reappears unharmed later in the episode.
  • Ling-Ling says to the baby, "For female baby, you sure don't seem very tied up in bag and dropped in river," a reference to infanticide of female babies in certain overpopulated parts of Asia.
  • Toot uses a black light to look for semen, which evidently there is a lot of around the house. However, black lights are typically used in crime scene investigations to look for traces of blood after spraying selected areas with luminol. Toot's using the black light to look for semen parodies investigative news reports which use them to expose uncleanliness in restaurants and hotels.
  • When Toot's black light reveals that Xandir's entire body is covered in semen, he exclaims, "I'm a really friendly ghost!", referring to Casper the Friendly Ghost.
  • Under the black light's ultraviolet rays, the semen-saturated hot tub emits a phosporescent glow; this is a reference to the movie Cocoon.
  • At one point, Clara addresses Toot as "Mommie Fattest", a reference to the book and movie Mommie Dearest. Toot's cruelty and poor parenting skills in this episode mirror those of Joan Crawford, at least according to the book's depiction of her.
  • Wooldoor's time traveling car, the Wooldelorean, is based on the Delorean from the Back to the Future trilogy. Right after the car disappears leaving fire trails, another Sockbat clad in Western gear (a reference to Back to the Future Part III) runs up behind where the car was, then fades out of existence- a reference to the original Back to the Future . Wooldoor's voice actor, James Arnold Taylor, is also the voice of the cowboy, doing an impression of Back to the Future star Michael J. Fox (for whom Taylor occasionally serves as a voice double). When Wooldoor arrives at his destination, the car is covered in ice, just as it was after making its first time travel trip in the first movie. He also runs over a male and female Sockbat, implying that their deaths erased the first Sockbat.
  • When the Child Services woman informs Toot that her baby was caught shoplifting, Toot responds by shaking the baby violently. This is a reference to Louise Woodward (aka the British Nanny), who was convicted of second degree murder for shaking a baby to death in 1997.
  • The end scene where the Child Services woman stands in front of a big numbered wheel while urging people to have their Nicaraguan babies spayed or neutered is a parody of Bob Barker's speech at the end of every episode of The Price Is Right, where he urges viewers to help control the pet population by having their pets spayed or neutered; the woman here is obviously standing on the set of The Price Is Right.
  • The elevator doors on the Penis Tower make the same noise as the doors on the Starship Enterprise.
  • At the end, QuadrapliJack's mask is seen floating in the flooded water. This is a reference to the 1994 movie, The Mask, where the mask was seen floating in the river at the end of the film.
Preceded by
Terms of Endearment
Drawn Together episodes
February 1, 2006
Succeeded by
A Tale of Two Cows