| Sgt Frog Abridged: Episode 8 | |
|---|---|
Season 1, Episode 8
| |
| Air date | 03/23/2011 |
| Length | 8:40 |
| Written by | Mugiwara Yoshi ThornBrain (Script can be read here) |
| Link | YouTube |
| Episode guide | |
| Previous Episode 7 |
Next Episode 9 |
Episode 8 of Sgt Frog Abridged is about the platoon trying to make a cartoon to earn back their weapons budget.
Episode Summary
Keroro empties the team's budget on toys, so they scheme to make money back through animation. They forget that they can't do anything.
Cast (In Order of Appearance)
- Giroro - ThornBrain
- Keroro - Mugiwara Yoshi
- Tamama - ThornBrain
- Kululu - InfamousGentleman
- Dororo - ThornBrain
- Mois - codeblackhayate
- Natsumi - LillyLivers
- Fuyuki - ThornBrain
- Aki - LillyLivers
- Sumomo (singing) - LillyLivers
- Sumomo (talking) - 1KidsEntertainment
- Narrator - ThornBrain
- Director - Sawtooth
Other voices
- Guy - ThornBrain
- Animator 1 - BigTUnit1
- Animator 2 - RevyMoonshine
- Animator 3 "Beefaroni Biff" - InfamousGentleman
- Animator 4 - 1KidsEntertainment
- Animator 5 - xJerry64x
- Mop - BigTUnit1
Sgt Frog Episodes Used
- Episode 33
Music Used
- "Spacewalk" - Keroro Gunsou OST - General background music
- "Tekno Gunsou" - Keroro Gunsou OST - General background music
- "Dead Radios" - Everybody Has A Hit Single - Sawtooth - General background music
- "Mujou's Theme" - Bomberman Jetters OST - General background music
- "Alphen10000" - Keroro Gunsou OST - General background music
- "Knight Errant" - Ren and Stimpy OST - Director giving a lecture
- French national anthem - Keroro says "Now who's with me?"
- Cover of "Chinatown, My Chinatown" - Michelle Lyons - Mint's Hints
Development Notes
The script was completed on March 6, and recording was completed on the 14th. Editing was completed Tuesday, March 22.
Post-Credits
- Part 1: Keroro rethinks his application to the military after being left in the theater.
- Part 2: Keroro continues to make out with himself.
Joke References and Explanations
Episode Running Gags, Series Running Gags, and Callbacks
- Thorn hid the covers to six various, favourite Post-Punk albums:
- Joy Division's Closer can be seen above Mois' head at the very start of the episode.
- Chrome's Red Exposure is above Mois right before Keroro reveals that he has a plan.
- Public Image Ltd.'s Second Edition is behind Natsumi when Fuyuki enters the room.
- The Clash's Sandinista is behind the computer when the scene transitions to Aki's workplace.
- Bauhaus' Mask is placed in the background artwork above Giroro in Kululu's room.
- The Fall's Hex Enduction Hour is placed into a piece of paper tacked into the side of the desk when Keroro and Tamama do the "Soda Cracker" position.
- Keroro acts as another Hispanic stereotype when he says "Don' be stupid".
- The platoon frequently show apathy towards their job, or that their ambition to take over Earth is undermined by extreme laziness:
- Mois thinks that her idea might take a lot of work, which seems to horrify the platoon.
- The team are vocally unenthusiastic about beginning the animation process.
- Likewise, they each give up after putting little-to-no effort into their respective jobs. Tamama seems to get so flustered that he has a brief moment similar to Tourettes Syndrome. Giroro even knocks himself out just from coloring a single picture.
- Despite Keroro attempting to rally everyone to give Mint's Hints a second shot, they are still vocally unenthusiastic.
- Keroro was in charge of scripting, but the final Mint's Hints episode contains no words whatsoever. Tamama, Dororo and Kululu also contributed nothing, due to the picture having no story, already being colored and having a plain white background. This is a major hint that Giroro may be the only mature, responsible member of the platoon, though it should be noted that Dororo wanted to do the coloring; Giroro just colored the picture first.
- Kululu once again attempts to creep out the group by saying the toys keep his bowels warm, bringing into question exactly what he did with it.
- The worker who brings Keroro and Tamama to Aki sounds like the Teeth guys from Episode 5, and he even repeats the recurring "Eyyyyy" reference to Fonzie.
- Tamama makes the most brazen comment about his sexuality thus far: "I'm a faggot!", though the final card in the credits plays this as to mean something stranger, such as a stick, a British pork dish, or a jet fighter.
- Keroro reads a line that says "AXE spray does not work", the second time the team have lampooned the body spray.
- Keroro continues to be somewhat illiterate: he can read the animation book, but he can't spell "hello", nor does he know what an "h" is.
- Giroro hints at his transvestism when Tamama yells at him, saying "At least I'm pretty!"
- Giroro takes less than a minute to draw and color a terrible drawing of him as a parody of the hosts of Blue's Clues. The team actually end up using the exact picture later on, though the Narrator describing the process as "days of toiling over crumpled paper" brings the rejected ideas into question.
- Giroro references Leonardo Da Vinci and the time it took for him to paint the Mona Lisa, but because Giroro is seemingly out of touch with everything, he gets the length of time off by a year; the Mona Lisa took sixteen years to paint.
- This is the first episode since Dororo's introduction where no characters get his name wrong, though an exhausted and delirious Giroro does refer to him as "Dahrahrawwwr".
- Kululu both makes the staple "nurrrrr" drone and the "HEGH" laugh from Episode 6, the latter of which has become a Kululu trademark.
- To fake out anyone who thought the Sumomo doll voice from Episode 6 was just a joke, Sumomo has a rich singing voice provided by LillyLivers, but her speaking voice is revealed to genuinely be 1KidsEntertainment's exaggerated rasp.
- Kululu remarks that the animation studio's scripts aren't in English, once again poking fun at the Western/Japanese language/culture divide.
- Though it is not intentional, Kululu seems to stop himself from doing the trademark "Kukuku" laugh, which would tie-in to the MidnightFrogs' dislike of the laugh.
- Dororo discovers the office toilet, pointing out how fitting a metaphor the toilet is for him and his life.
- He later references the Jay-Z song "99 Problems", which the team previously referenced in Best Wishes Abridged, though this time he spins it to talk about his numerous personal issues.
- Giroro says that "real men live on Kool-Aid powder." This is a reference to the SFA7 Launch party episode of TheMidnightFrogs Podcast where Sawtooth confused Kool-Aid pouches with packets of Kool-Aid powder.
- Dororo makes another mention of being lonely at inappropriate times, this time about mints making him lonely.
- Mop makes an appearance in the Post-Credits, though not physically; Mop was "created" by BigTUnit1 in the post-show at a MidnightFrogs Podcast, and he is literally just a mop with a silly voice.
Other Jokes and References
- When Kululu suggest selling Dororo for cash, the two hint at Dororo doing the same thing to his little brother.
- Keroro uses Natsumi's pink hair as a reason for why she might understand how animation works, a joke on oddly-colored hair being prevalent in Japanese animation.
- Keroro's book on animation seems to have pages missing; it jumps from information about scripting to a critique of AXE body spray.
- As a pun, Tamama decides to begin the storyboards, only to sit down and wait until he gets bored.
- Giroro reads a joke from British comedian Jimmy Carr about vaginal pain. Tamama can be heard groaning "Ow" behind the door, hinting towards his reveal in Episode 10
- Kululu apparently stole the backgrounds from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, which immediately ruins the project for everyone, a joke about the then-popular dislike of Haruhi Suzumiya.
- Sumomo sings "Do the can-can like a twat" in a similar tune to the music that would be used for Mint's Hints.
- The Director reveals new strict security measures at the office: anyone caught invisible is shot on sight, a very blatant contradiction in terms that appears to be lost on Keroro.
- Kululu references a famous episode of The Twilight Zone called "Time Enough at Last", but insists that the reference alone is supposed to be a joke, a jab at the overabundance of extraneous referential material in abridged series.
- When Keroro and Tamama do the awkward "Soda Cracker" pose, Dororo, Kululu and Giroro simply have fun at their expense.
- "Mint's Hints" and "Clover's Disc-overs" are plays on the title of the popular kid's show Blues Clues.
- As a somewhat meta joke, no effort is made to lip-sync the Director when he talks about himself being lazy.
- The song that plays over Mint's Hints was taken from a shitpost by Michelle Lyons, but the origin of the song was unknown for over 11 years. Eventually it was learned that the song is a distorted instrumental cover of "Chinatown, My Chinatown" by The Mills Brothers.
Reception
TheMidnightFrogs reached the 1000 subscriber milestone shortly after the episode went live. On May 8, 2011 it became the third SFA episode to reach 100 "likes". As of June 25, 2011 it has 110 "likes", 0 "dislikes" and 102 "favorites" - as of August 14, 2016 it has 794 likes and 11 dislikes.
Thorn has gone on to see the episode as one of SFA's worst, since she and Yoshi had no ideas during scriptwriting except for lazy, surface-level humor that drew too much attention to itself. Yoshi, Travis and Jacob still consider the episode to be good. They all agree that Mint's Hints is one of the best things to come out of SFA, however.
Additional Trivia
- Yoshi told the team that they would all get lines in the episode at the SFA Birthday Party podcast, hence why many appear as the animators.
- Dororo and Kululu hint early in the episode that Dororo once sold his little brother for cash. When Thorn came up with this sequence, she was not aware that Funimation made a similar joke about Dororo selling his little brother to space pirates.
- A celebratory podcast aired April 9, 2011.
- A commentary for the episode was uploaded October 21, 2011.
- Thorn has expressed dissatisfaction with the episode since its release. It was considered for a future remake, but Thorn decided against it due to thinking there was nothing more they could do with this episode, and that its badness was indicative of Season 1's weaknesses on the whole.