The Lemon-AIDS Walk

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“The Lemon-AIDS Walk”
Drawn Together episode
Episode no.	Season 2 Episode 12
Guest stars	Billy West as Stimpy, Popeye, and Mall Security Guard Alex Borstein as Lois Griffin and AIDS walk coordinator
Written by	Erik Sommers
Directed by	Tuck Tucker
Production no.	212
Original airdate	February 22, 2006
Episode chronology
← Previous	Next →
"Xandir and Tim, Sitting in a Tree"	"A Very Special Drawn Together Afterschool Special"

"The Lemon-AIDS Walk" is the nineteenth episode of the animated series Drawn Together.

Contents 1 Storyline 2 Notes and inside references 3 Animated cameos 4 Cultural references

[edit] Storyline

A friendly badminton competition against the former cast of Drawn Together reveals a shameful secret about Captain Hero: he is terrible at sports. He tries to drown his sorrows in lemonade at a lemonade stand that Clara and Wooldoor have set up, but no one wants to tolerate his drunken behavior. Foxxy comes by asking for someone to sponsor her in the upcoming AIDS walk, which gives Captain Hero an idea. Realizing that walking is something he's perfectly capable of, Hero tells Foxxy that he won't sponsor her; rather, he'll enter the AIDS walk himself and win it.

Foxxy tries to tell him that the AIDS walk is a charity event, not a competition, but Hero won't hear of it. He immediately begins training, only to run into another obstacle when he realizes he isn't even a champion walker; the elderly women at the mall can walk rings around him. He realizes he is in need of some outside help, which he finds at the mall's nutritional center when the employee there hooks him up with some steroids. The steroids make Hero's body big and powerful, but they also make him even more difficult for the other housemates to deal with than usual. After Foxxy finds out his secret, the housemates stage an intervention for him, which he responds to by killing everyone in a steroid-fueled rage.

Deciding he doesn't belong in the Drawn Together house anymore, Captain Hero decides to go somewhere he can be accepted and understood, and ends up befriending and moving in with Popeye. He and Popeye have a great time training together until Popeye suddenly dies of AIDS one day. Popeye tells Hero that he contracted the disease by sharing contaminated steroid needles. With his last dying breath, Popeye asks Captain Hero to get clean, and hopefully prevent others from suffering the same fate. Hero does just this, showing up at the AIDS walk completely restored to his old self. Hero ends up "winning" the AIDS walk completely clean by killing or horribly injuring all the other walkers, resulting in no money being generated for charity. Hero ignores the crying spokeswoman and walks off with his "prizes", the basket holding names for a raffle, and an AIDS quilt.

Meanwhile, Wooldoor is having fun running the lemonade stand with his good friend Clara, at least until Spanky Ham, playing the bad boy, induces Wooldoor to leave the lemonade stand behind and go with him on his motorcycle to the mall. The pair go to the mall candy store together, but as the two are in line, Wooldoor suddenly realizes that he doesn't have the money to pay for the candy he's holding. Spanky urges Wooldoor to just steal the candy- after all, that's what a cool person would do. Wooldoor panics and runs out with the candy in tow. After a showdown with the security guard, Wooldoor is caught and taken into custody in the mall security office. He is held there for a while and then let go, but once he gets out, he finds his whole world has changed, and he is unable to adjust to life on the outside again.

In an attempt to find some normality, he goes back to Clara at the lemonade stand, only to discover she couldn't wait for him, and has given his job away—to Spanky Ham, of all people. Wooldoor freaks out, and then finally decides that he cannot deal with life as a "free man". He must go back to the mall, repeat his crime, and be sent back to "prison" (actually, the Mall Security/Lost & Found Lounge).

He returns, and after going on a Looney Tunes-style crime spree, is caught again. Clara shows up to tell Wooldoor not to despair, that she'll wait for him this time, even if he's held in custody for 28 whole minutes. Wooldoor is let out for good behavior after 15 minutes, but when he tries to find Clara, he is told she left 10 minutes ago.

Musical number: "Judge Fudge Theme Song", a 70's-style funk/soul song, plays over the opening credits of a fictitious TV show, The Judge Fudge Adventure Power Hour. Also, Sammy Hagar's "Winner Takes It All" plays during the AIDS walk in a parody of training montages and big competition scenes from numerous films. The song was originally featured in the Sylvester Stallone movie Over the Top.

[edit] Notes and inside references

• Throughout the first season of Drawn Together the announcer proclaimed several times that it was the first ever animated reality show, yet the cast here is playing badminton against a group of characters who are said to be the "original" Drawn Together cast.

• At the beginning of the episode, the lemonade at Clara and Wooldoor's stand is being sold for five cents a cup. When Wooldoor later returns to discover his job has been given to Spanky, the price has gone up to seven cents.

• The wish that Captain Hero made in "Hot Tub" finally comes true, when the housemates bring him a twelve-year-old girl and a donkey.

• At the AIDS walk, Captain Hero wears pink jogging pants with the word "juicy" emblazoned across the rear end, just like Toot's baby had the word written on her diaper in "Captain Girl." The phrase is a reference to the Juicy Couture clothing line, but its usage here and in "Captain Girl also plays on the word's slang meaning of being sexually desirable.

• A running gag throughout this particular episode is the multiple appearances of a woman with blonde hair in a ponytail clad in a blue jogging outfit. She is most recognizable as the AIDS Walk coordinator, the hysterical woman who screams that "the AIDS walk is ruined!" after Captain Hero crosses the finish line. Seconds before that scene, she was shown being electrocuted to death when Hero smashed the power lines' support pole. She also appeared during Wooldoor's first chase scene in the mall, in a television commercial, and during several street scenes.

• During the scene in the park just before the walk, when Foxxy sees Captain Hero and states that he was the second to last person she expected to show up, the show cuts to a tearful Foxxy in the confessional mentioning how she misses her son Timmy. Similar clips referencing Timmy had been shown in "Dirty Pranking No. 2" and "A Tale of Two Cows." The random nature of the Timmy reference here would seem to indicate that the show is now using Timmy as a running gag.

• Toward the end of the episode, the Comedy Central bug at the bottom of the screen that tells what shows are coming up displayed a notice that The Judge Fudge Power Hour would be coming up next, previewing the Judge Fudge sequence that closes the episode.

• Judge Fudge is shown arresting the Mad Libber, the villain from the episode "Captain Girl."

[edit] Animated cameos

• The team against which the housemates play badminton is comprised of Thomas the Tank Engine, the creature from Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, Stimpy (voiced by his original voice actor Billy West), the Helping Hand from the Hamburger Helper commercials, an old political cartoon representing pork barrel politics, and a Transformer.
  • There are slight physical changes for some of the characters. On Ren & Stimpy, Stimpy has reddish-brown fur and no tail, but here, is blue and has a tail. The Helping Hand from the Hamburger Helper commercials is a left hand with only three fingers and a thumb, but here he is a right hand with all four fingers and a thumb. The Maurice Sendak creature is a bluish-gray color in the book, but here, he is white and wearing a striped T-shirt.
    

    

    Captain Hero and Popeye.

• Popeye is shown with syringes tattooed on his arms instead of anchors. Shortly after Captain Hero meets Popeye, he is introduced to Popeye's girlfriend Olive Oyl. Olive Oyl—known for being skinny and flat-chested—now appears to be a little more shapely and has prominent breasts due to implied breast implant surgery. Popeye also appears to be Olive's pimp in this scene.

• During the gym scene, Captain Hero sees many superheroes and cartoon stars that are thought to be "juiced", such as The Thing, He-Man, Panthro from ThunderCats, He-Man's sister She-Ra, Spider-Man doing chin-ups, and Western-African Dwarf Crocodile Man from "Ghostesses in the Slot Machine." The Jolly Green Giant is also mentioned.

• Two people pass Wooldoor and give him money. Though their faces cannot be seen, they look like Lois and Peter Griffin from Family Guy; this is even more obvious when Lois speaks. Lois's voice actor, Alex Borstein, also provides her voice here. Borstein makes her third appearance on Drawn Together, having previously played Clara's stepmother in "Clara's Dirty Little Secret" and the leader of the Jelly Donuts gang in "A Tale of Two Cows."

[edit] Cultural references

• Captain Hero declares that sports are his kryptonite, referring to one of the few things against which Superman is vulnerable.

• The scene where Wooldoor is trapped by the security guard above the mall waterfall is a reference to a scene from The Fugitive where US Marshal Samuel Gerard (Tommy Lee Jones) pursues Dr. Richard Kimble (Harrison Ford) in a tunnel over a spillway. The security guard even says "I don't care," repeating Jones' line in the movie.
  • At the end of this scene, the security guard kills the hostage and blood is seen running down the waterfall; this is a reference to the end of the film Cherry Falls.

• The nutritional center, GNP, is based on the real life nutritional center, GNC, which stands for General Nutrition Centers. GNP stands for Guy's Nutrition Place.

• The GNP man says to Captain Hero, "Walk this way," to which Captain Hero responds, "If I could walk that way, I wouldn't need steroids." This a reference to a running gag from vaudeville acts such as the "Doctor, Doctor" routine, in which one character would say, "Walk this way," and another would say, "If I could walk that way, I wouldn't need a doctor!". "Walk this way" has been frequently parodied by Monty Python's Flying Circus (where the second character would usually be interrupted after saying, "If I could walk that way—" and then be sternly warned against completing the joke), and in many of Mel Brooks's movies (where when one character tells the other to "walk this way", the second character would walk the same way as the first person is doing). In this instance, after Captain Hero says the joke, he is booed by an offstage voice.
  • This joke is referenced again during Wooldoor's mall chase, when he and the mall cops run into a Chinese restaurant called Wok This Way.

• When Captain Hero takes steroids, the rapid cutting between scenes that follows (the dilated pupils, increased blood flow, acne) is a reference to the hip hop montages in the film Requiem for a Dream. One of the film's lead characters also has an increasingly infected injection site similar to the one Captain Hero possesses here, though it is on his arm rather than his buttocks.

• Whenever Captain Hero takes steroids, his penis shrinks, a reference to how persistent steroid use makes the testicles shrink and causes impotence. Later, Hero is shown with a cameltoe.

• Captain Hero refers to Toot as Shrek 2 during this episode, presumably comparing her to the movie's titular ogre.

• Xandir lists "home run records" as one of the things steroids cause, a reference to the recent Major League Baseball steroid scandal.

• Wooldoor's inner monologue about life "on the outside" is inspired by Brooks Hatlen, a character in The Shawshank Redemption. This is not the first time Wooldoor has been used as a doppelgänger for Hatlen's character; in the "The One Wherein There Is a Big Twist, Part II," his hanging scene is also inspired by the film. The scene here is almost line for line the same as what appears in the movie, the exception being when Wooldoor asks permission to use the restroom (which came from Morgan Freeman's character Red rather than Hatlen).

• When Captain Hero throws Ling-Ling at the TV, the glass breaks and water comes out. This is a reference to The Ring, in which water comes out of the TV just before someone dies.

• After the carnage of Hero's intervention, he walks over to the nearest ballpark and hits a home run. The ball lands in the pool and is retrieved by ball collectors in a boat with a fishing net. This is a reference to Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants, who has hit many home runs out of Pacific Bell Park and into the body of water bordering the stadium, McCovey Cove.

• Hero mentions plans to rule the galaxy with Popeye as father and son, an allusion to the speech Darth Vader makes to Luke Skywalker toward the end of The Empire Strikes Back when he is trying to get Luke to join him on the Dark Side.

• The drawings Wooldoor makes of himself planning his caper at the mall resemble the character Binky from the Matt Groening comic strip Life in Hell.

• The mall security guard says into his walkie-talkie, "Attention! We have an RU-486 in progress!". This is a reference to Mifepristone, a medication that can be used as an abortifacient.

• The scene where Wooldoor is being chased by the mall cops contains a number of references.
  • Wooldoor and the mall cops all sob profusely upon exiting a movie called Cancer Baby starring Julia Roberts, a reference to the numerous tearjerker films in which she has starred, including Dying Young and Steel Magnolias.
  • Wooldoor and the cops run into the Acme Medical Supply store, referencing the fictitious company which supplies Wile E. Coyote with all his devices for capturing the Road Runner. Acme also made the liposuction machine Xandir used on Toot in "Requiem for a Reality Show" and the gay test Xandir took in "Gay Bash".
  • Also during the chase, Wooldoor and his pursuers run into the pet store and emerge riding upon kittens. They ride their furry steeds into a Chinese restaurant and emerge (sans kittens) with boxes of delicious take-out food. This is a reference to the alleged use of cat or dog meat in Asian cooking.
  • Wooldoor's mall romp in general is possibly a spoof of a Bugs Bunny cartoon in which he is running away from a department store manager who wants to have him stuffed to put on display in a taxidermy department after Bugs outlives his usefulness. When Bugs and the manager enter each store during the chase, each one comes out wearing a product that came from the store.

• The "Judge Fudge" theme song and show is a parody of both many blaxploitation films/cartoons of the 70's, and intros to popular small court shows (Judge Judy, The People's Court, etc.). The title, The Judge Fudge Adventure Power Hour, is a reference to the 70's cartoon The Godzilla Power Hour.

• On his deathbed, Popeye sings, "I'm weak at the finish 'cause AIDS beats out spinach, I'm Popeye the dying man", then toots the words "of AIDS" out of his pipe. This is a parody of his theme song, "I'm strong to the finish 'cause I eats my spinach, I'm Popeye the sailor man! (toot toot!)"

• At the AIDS walk, after Captain Hero finishes his monologue, Xandir turns to him and says, "You are like the son the courts will never allow me to have!", referring to the difficulty gay couples and individuals face from United States courts concerning the adoption and custody of children.

• At the end of the episode, when Captain Hero "wins" the AIDS walk, he looks up to the sky and sees Popeye's spirit smiling at him, only to ask, "Who the hell is that asshole?". This is a commonly used shot in movies and TV series in which the main character looks up to the sky and sees either the spirit of a beloved character or clouds take the form of the person. This is the second time Drawn Together has used a shot like this, the first time being the shot of Foxxy's fallen bandmates in "Captain Hero's Marriage Pact."
  • The image of Popeye that is used in this sequence is the same one that appeared at the beginning of the animated Popeye cartoon shorts.

Preceded by Xandir and Tim, Sitting in a Tree

Drawn Together episodes February 22, 2006

Succeeded by A Very Special Drawn Together Afterschool Special