Spelling Applebee's

Infobox Television episode
Title=Spelling Applebee's
Series=Drawn Together
Season=3
Episode=3
Airdate= October 19 2006
Writer= Jordan Young


Caption = Hero creates a huge car wreck for Clara's excitement.
Director= Frank Marino
Production = 303
Guests = David Cooley
Prev=Wooldoor Sockbat's Giggle-Wiggle Funny Tickle Non-Traditional Progressive Multicultural Roundtable!
Next=Unrestrainable Trainable

"Spelling Applebee's" is the twenty-fifth episode of the animated television series "Drawn Together".

toryline

After gathering the housemates together, the producer announces that the household is to compete in a spelling bee for the chance to win a gift certificate to Applebee's. Foxxy immediately declares that she refuses to take part in any spelling bee, regardless of what is on the line. Toot teases Foxxy that the reason she won't compete is because she is illiterate. However, Foxxy then reveals that she used to be the best speller in all the land, winning championships year after year. However, after a violent racial incident at one particular bee caused her streak to end (Foxxy mistook the word "knickers" for a racial slur, causing a riot to break out), a disgraced Foxxy swore she'd never spell again. As she drowns her sorrows in a bar, Foxxy watches the "Drawn Together" gang compete against the "Peanuts" gang on television, a contest which goes quite badly for them. A bar patron recognizes Foxxy from her glory days as a champion speller, and asks her why she isn't at the bee. Foxxy restates her desire not to spell anymore, but the man convinces her she needs to face her problems and compete. Foxxy finally agrees with this, and arrives at the "Drawn Together" house just as the "Peanuts" gang is declared the winners. Foxxy tells the judges to give her one more word, which they do; when Foxxy spells it correctly, the housemates are suddenly declared the winners. As the group gather around Foxxy to congratulate her, Spanky Ham steps forward and introduces himself and says he wants to take Foxxy to the top.

Foxxy is delighted and hits the spelling bee circuit once again. She does even better this time around, and before too long, the championships are rolling in once again. A statue is erected to commemorate Foxxy's achievements, but at the unveiling, a new challenger named Hadji calls Foxxy out and challenges her to a match. Foxxy is eager to compete, but Spanky steps in to stop the match from taking place. When Foxxy later confronts him about why he did this, Spanky admits the truth. The only reason Foxxy won all her spelling bees was because they were fixed. Spanky and the Spelling Bee Commission had conspired to give the world a "great black hope" by setting Foxxy up with easy opponents designed to make her look good. He tells Foxxy there is no way she's good enough to win a match fair and square, especially one against a foreigner. Foxxy appears to accept, but later goes behind Spanky's back and agrees to the match against Hadji. Spanky finds out and scolds her, repeatedly telling her she's not good enough. Foxxy decides that Spanky may be right, and runs away depressed. After she throws her motorcycle helmet at a statue of the Iwo Jima flag raising, Spanky in the sidecar informs her he's had a change of heart, and he is now convinced she can win. With renewed hope, Foxxy goes back into training, and shortly thereafter is shown facing off against Hadji. With the match on the line, Foxxy is given the word "knickers" to spell - the same word that caused her to lose her temper in the previous bee. Despite her anger, Foxxy manages to restrain herself and spell the word correctly, and is named the spelling champion of the world.

Meanwhile, Captain Hero wants to go to the supermarket, but announces he is afraid of a bully who he always runs into whenever he's there. Clara agrees to accompany him, and upon arriving, she discovers that the bully is actually a homeless man. She tells off the homeless man, an act which Hero finds decidedly arousing, causing him to begin seeing Clara in a new light. Throughout their whole grocery trip, Hero is unable to stop thinking about Clara, and he quickly realizes he has a crush on her. He gets her to agree to go out with him by kidnapping and killing her cat. However, their date does not go well, as Clara is upset that Hero chooses to make out with the waiter instead of conversing with her. As they walk home, Clara is annoyed, and Hero is sad that he appears to have failed in his attempt to win Clara's heart. However, on the way home, Hero inadvertently causes a car crash, an occurrence which turns Clara on to no end. Hero decides to take advantage of this, and keeps causing car crashes. In response, Clara agrees to keep seeing Hero. Just as his romantic feelings for Clara reach their peak, however, Hero notices that Clara never wants to stick around following her crash-inspired orgasms, choosing to instead hang out with her friends, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Princess Ariel. He confronts Clara and says that she doesn't love him and is only using him for the car crashes; Clara's cool response lets him know he is right. Taking Xandir's advice, Hero reverses his plans, and now goes around everywhere doing everything in his power to prevent crashes, which causes Clara to become extremely frustrated.

In honor of his work in preventing crashes, Hero is awarded the Key to the City on the steps of City Hall. Clara approaches him at the ceremony and tells him that she did love the crashes, but she misses having him to share them with. Hero seeks her out again, and the two make up. Hero goes back to work by causing another car crash, which in turn causes Clara to get excited again. Nevertheless, she continues to resist his romantic moves toward her, and decides to leave with her friends again. Hero, however, was prepared for such a moment, and reveals that in order to teach Clara a lesson, he ensured that the victims of the aforementioned crash "were" her friends. As Clara, horrified and heartbroken, weeps over her friends' mangled remains, Hero tells the audience to "never mess with the emotions of a dangerous lunatic."

At the end of the episode, after she wins the spelling bee, Foxxy says, "I did it! I did it for my knickers!" After she says this, many pairs of knickers begin ravaging the city; as the camera surveys the carnage, Clara can be heard moaning in ecstasy.

Musical Number: This episode features the largest number of songs of any "Drawn Together" episode to date. First, a depressed Captain Hero sings R.E.M.'s "Everybody Hurts" as he walks through the wreckage he caused for Clara. The song "Holding Out for a Hero" plays during a montage of Hero trying to get back at Clara by preventing car crashes. The song was originally performed by Bonnie Tyler, though it appears here in a rerecorded version. It was previously alluded to in the episode "Captain Hero's Marriage Pact" (as one of Unusually Flexible Girl's tattoos), though it was not actually heard in that episode. Foxxy sings "No Easy Way Out", a song which originally appeared on the soundtrack of "Rocky IV", during a training montage. Finally, "Fake Rocky Training Song" plays during another Foxxy montage. The song is a parody of the "Rocky" theme song, "Gonna Fly Now"; according to Spanky, they are forced to use a cheap knockoff because they are unable to afford the real song.

Notes and inside references

* This episode features the winner of the "Get Drawn In" contest run on Comedy Central's website during the summer, in which a fan was selected to be animated into an episode. The winner, whose name is given as Keith Franklin, appears in this episode as the waiter Captain Hero makes out with while on his date with Clara.
* The music playing at the beginning of this episode is the same piece used for the end credits of "Hot Tub" and "N.R.A.y RAY", and as the background music for the "Censored/Uncensored" game on the Season One DVD; this is the first time it has been featured in an episode.

* The shot of Clara's striptease in the opening titles changes yet again in this episode. The first two episodes of the season used the shot as it was originally animated prior to being censored by the network. In the first episode, the clip was shown unedited, and in the second, it was pixellated. In this and in all subsequent episodes, the original version of the clip is dropped entirely, and replaced with the censored version that appeared in "Ghostesses in the Slot Machine". [http://forums.toonzone.net/showpost.php?p=1988940&postcount=68]

* During the first scene of Clara and Hero's dating montage, Captain Hero is wearing full length tights but 2 scenes later he is back in cut-offs.

* When Hero is receiving the key to the city he says he "Is one man, with three different personalities." but when he runs through his personalities four are shown. Not including his original Hero personality. These are Paco; his Mexican personality previously seen in Xandir and Tim, Sitting in a Tree, a baby, a pacman parody and Flavor Flav.

* This episode also features a computer prank entitled "Screamer" where the viewer is tricked to go as near as they can to the screen and then a scary image is shown.

* When Hadji removes his Johnny Quest outfit, the B on his medallion is backwards. In the next frame, it's facing the correct way.

Animated cameos

* At the beginning of the episode, the Drawn Together team is shown competing against the "Peanuts" gang. Visible in this scene are Charlie Brown, Peppermint Patty, Sally Brown, Linus van Pelt, Lucy van Pelt, Schroeder, Marcie, and Snoopy. This is Charlie Brown's third appearance on the show, and his first with a speaking role. He previously appeared in "Requiem for a Reality Show" (where Foxxy has him masked and leashed like a dog), and in "The One Wherein There Is a Big Twist, Part II", where he is seen lying face down on the beach. Tara Strong provides the voices of both Charlie Brown and Linus in this episode.

* The Disney princesses Snow White, Aurora from "Sleeping Beauty", and Ariel from "The Little Mermaid" appear in this episode as Princess Clara's best friends, all riding together in a "Cinderella"-themed carriage. They are all victims of the crash Hero causes at the end of the episode to punish Clara for using him. This is the second time Ariel appears in an episode (the first was in "Foxxy vs. the Board of Education"), and the first in which she actually speaks. The appearance of the princesses is an in-joke in that Clara's character is a collective parody of them - with Ariel being a big influence on Clara's design. Clara's voice actress Tara Strong voices Ariel and Snow White in this sequence; Aurora is voiced by Foxxy's VA Cree Summer. Mulan is mentioned but not seen.

* Following the car crash, Snow White states that it was "what [they] get for letting Mulan drive". This is a reference to the Drawn Together episode Super Nanny, where it is discovered through Ling Ling that Asian people have the inability to drive.

* Prior to removing his turban and Nehru jacket, Foxxy's nemesis, Hadji, appears to be the adult form of the character from "Jonny Quest".

Cultural references

* The plot of Princess Clara being sexually aroused by car crashes is a parody of the plot of J. G. Ballard's book "Crash" and the 1996 film.

* After she tells Hero if he wants her, he knows where to find her, Clara puts on a striped shirt, a hat, and glasses, and then disappears into the crowd, a reference to the title character from the "Where's Waldo?" book series. The "screaming alien" during the Waldo scene is in reference to the "Where's Waldo" Screamer prank.

* The scene where the "Drawn Together" team competes in the spelling bee against the "Peanuts" gang is a reference to the film "A Boy Named Charlie Brown", whose plot centered around Charlie Brown competing in a spelling bee. The background music for this scene is the film's theme song, "Linus and Lucy" by Vince Guaraldi.

* When Foxxy Love yanks the Applebee's gift certificate away from Charlie Brown and causes him to fall on his rear, this refers to when Lucy van Pelt would yank the football away while Charlie Brown was trying to kick it in the comic strip "Peanuts".

*The man who got yelled at by his wife is also seen in the bar far in A Very Special Drawn Together After School Special.

* When Clara has an orgasm following a car crash, an elderly woman standing nearby says, "I'll have what she's having." This is a reference to Meg Ryan's famous orgasm scene in "When Harry Met Sally".

* A great deal of Foxxy's spelling bee plot-line follows the plot of Rocky III. The scene where Hadji challenges Foxxy at the unveiling of her statue is almost an exact replica of a similar scene with Rocky and Clubber Lang, however, Hadji's line "I must break you" before their fight is from Rocky IV.

* A holodeck from Star Trek is used to gather the house mates to announce the spelling bee contest.

*Foxy riding on a purple motorcycle is a reference to the one Prince rides in Purple Rain. The music playing during this scene is also similar to that in the movie