Requiem for a Reality Show

"Requiem for a Reality Show" is the fourth episode of the animated series Drawn Together.

Storyline
The house is divided into two teams who then compete in a contest to see who will be given control of the house's food supply for the rest of the week. The challenges seem relatively unequal: Team A (Hero, Clara, Spanky, and Wooldoor) must find a low-carb cure for polio while Team B (Foxxy, Toot, Xandir, and Ling-Ling) must place an egg in a bucket. (Foxxy explains that her team always gets the easier challenges because she blows the producers every week.) The contest is extremely close, but Team B wins, and Toot celebrates by eating all the food she can get her hands on. She blimps up—literally—leaving her seriously depressed. Xandir tries to fix it by teaching Toot to regurgitate in order to lose weight rapidly—with rather disgusting and harmful results (she leaves the entire house filled with vomit). Xandir, Foxxy, and Ling-Ling convince Toot to try the opposite approach, anorexia.

Meanwhile, the losing team—Clara, Spanky, Wooldoor and Hero - suffers from starvation. Captain Hero gets food from Foxxy by allowing her to humiliate him for it, eventually causing the two of them to enter into a hardcore BDSM relationship, consisting mainly of Foxxy physically punishing Hero in all sorts of painful and (for Hero) erotic ways. Eventually however, the spark goes out of their relationship, and the two break up.

Spanky obtains food by bullying Wooldoor into trapping and killing the woodland animals that Clara is able to summon by her singing. The three enjoy a wonderful feast, until Clara discovers where all the meat came from. Wooldoor is distraught and begs for her forgiveness, but Clara refuses, still in anguish over the death of her woodland friends. Wooldoor gathers up the animal carcasses to give them a proper burial, but discovers that one of the animals, a chipmunk, is still alive. Spanky immediately confronts Wooldoor and demands that he hand over the chipmunk. However, Wooldoor sings Clara's bully song to inspire himself, and he finally finds the courage to stand up to Spanky. He brushes Spanky off and takes the chipmunk to Clara, who is so happy that she forgives Wooldoor. After Wooldoor leaves, Clara asks the chipmunk to forgive her for unwittingly leading all the other animals to their deaths. He agrees and promises Clara he won't tell anyone else about it; she then responds, "I wish I could believe you," and breaks its neck. That evening, Clara, Spanky, and Wooldoor have another delicious meal. Clara also uses the excuse that the Meat Blimp crashed, and the three laugh.

Musical number: "Bully", sung by Clara as she tries to convince Wooldoor to stand up to Spanky. Also, "Let Me Love You Tonight" by Pure Prairie League plays during a montage of Captain Hero's BDSM relationship with Foxxy.

Notes and inside references

* While Wooldoor is rushing around, Ling-Ling is seen curled up asleep in Clara's lap like a cat. After Wooldoor disturbs them, Ling-Ling's tail changes from its usual exclamation point shape to the punctuation symbols used to indicate profanity in comic strips.

* Spanky's line, "For the love of Allah—who's great and merciful—haven't you gotten rid of that polio yet?", with its use of Allah in the place of God, and the subsequent epithet, indicates that he is a member of the Muslim faith. This is further confirmed and reinforced in Episode 6, "Dirty Pranking No. 2", where Spanky announces that he had inconveniently converted a month before the September 11 attacks. The ironic fact that pork is forbidden by Islamic dietary law is not mentioned.

* When he recaps the plot following the food competition, Spanky says, "Team A won the grocery competition and more food than they knew what to do with." However, it was actually Team B (Foxxy, Toot, Xandir, and Ling-Ling) who won.

* When the crate with the label "Humiliation" falls on Captain Hero's back, his glasses fall off. But in the very next shot, he still has them and takes them off himself.

* Clara twists the chipmunk's neck to prevent it from blurting out that she's indirectly responsible for the death of its fellows. In the first episode of the second season, there is a flashback of that scene, but in an altered version showing a close-up of their faces, with Clara holding the chipmunk at the height of her face. In the original version, she held the rodent level with her stomach.

* In the NBC promo parody, Toot introduces herself as "Toot Brownstein", using the Americanized pronunciation of her last name of Braunstein.

* In the broadcast version of the episode, Toot states, "In tonight's episode, we poorly dealt with eating disorders." The word "poorly" is not spoken in the DVD version.

Animated cameos

* After Foxxy and Captain Hero break up, Foxxy's new slave is Charlie Brown, while Captain Hero's mistress is Natasha Fatale from The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. Foxxy says to Charlie Brown, "Come on, blockhead, Foxxy's gonna show you some good grief!" "Blockhead" was the name the other kids used to tease Charlie Brown in the Peanuts comic strip, while "Good grief!" was Charlie Brown's catchphrase in the strip.

Guest in the confessional
*Clara's Woodland Creature friends while she sings the "Bully Song".
Cultural references

* The opening scene where Spanky is chasing Wooldoor, and the pair stop in a freezeframe with parenthesized mock-Latin names below their own real ones, is a direct parody of most Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner cartoons. Spanky is "Pornus Interruptus." Wooldoor is "Ritalinus Shouldatakus." Ritalin is a drug used to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, which Wooldoor is clearly suffering from.

* Near the start of the episode Spanky mishears something that is said and replies "Bukkake?", referring to a group sex practice consisting of facial ejaculations that originates in Japan. Bukkake would be referenced again in Season Two's "Captain Hero's Marriage Pact" when Ling-Ling watches a show called Bukkake Chef and complains that the secret ingredient is always the same.

* This episode's food competition is a direct parody of those seen in Big Brother. The main difference is that on Big Brother, the losing team does not starve, but must subsist on staple food for a week.

* When the contest begins, a UFO with a fishing pole and a traffic light attached aids them. This a parody of Lakitu and a reference to the Mario Kart video game series.

* Toot's refrigerator scene ends in a shot of her lifting the refrigerator above her head and dumping the contents into her mouth. The point of view is from inside the refrigerator, and shows her mouth expanding into a circular chasm with rings of teeth which continue down into her throat, accompanied by a shrieking, animal-like roar. This is a reference to the sandworms of the Dune saga; it is also a reference to Return of the Jedi, as Toot's multi-toothed gullet resembles a Star Wars creature called Sarlacc.

* The sequence where Clara sings while a bunch of woodland creatures appear out of nowhere to join her parodies the improbable musical sequences found in many Disney animated films, particularly those where the heroines are accompanied by birds and other animals as they sing (e.g. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Sleeping Beauty).

* When Clara first summons the animals with her singing, a gerbil climbs out of Xandir's anus. This is a reference to the practice of gerbilling, in which small animals—usually gerbils—are inserted into the rectum for sexual pleasure. Though it is widely talked about, there is no evidence that the practice actually exists. A popular (but untrue) urban legend asserts that actor Richard Gere once had to visit a hospital emergency room to have a gerbil removed.

*After Clara sings her song, Spanky sees a bird perched on a cactus, which appears to him as a roasted chicken. This is a commonly used animation technique, particularly associated with Looney Tunes.

* Spanky's comment "We'll eat like dingoes in a maternity ward!" is a reference to a 1980 incident that occurred in Australia in which Lindy Chamberlain was wrongfully accused of murdering her infant daughter, Azaria; she was exonerated when it was discovered the child was in fact killed and eaten by a dingo. The incident was immortalized in the 1988 film A Cry in the Dark, starring Meryl Streep.

* When one of Spanky's traps catches a rabbit, a machine comes out which shaves and applies makeup to it before finally decapitating the animal. This is a reference to the extremely controversial practice of testing cosmetics on animals.

* The coming alive of the pieces of meat resembles the part in Homer's Odyssey where Odysseus's men have slaughtered the sun god's cattle on Trinakia, the Island of the Sun, and the meat and hides suddenly scream out their pain to the heavens.

* When Foxxy teases Captain Hero with the sandwich, several sounds and matching panels ("SNAP!", "BREAK!!!", "STARVE!!" and "SHAME!!") pop in. This is a reference to the 1960's Batman TV series, starring Adam West in the titular role. The program's fight scenes were always accompanied by cartoonish sound effects and title cards displaying words like "pow" and "bam" (which was done to pay tribute to the heroes' comic book origins).

* As Wooldoor collects the leftover meat for a proper burial, a surviving chipmunk begs, "Don't bury me... I'm not dead!" This was a tagline featured in a fairly well known marketing campaign for the film The Serpent and the Rainbow, depicting a zombie tearing out of a casket. In the movie, Bill Pullman's character utters the line when he collapses on the street, due to a drug that will induce a deathlike state and cause him to be buried alive.

* Xandir uses ACME liposuction on Toot. ACME is the ubiquitous brand name featured in Looney Tunes cartoons in place of actual brands; it turned up most often in the Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner shorts. It has since been used in several other cartoons and television shows as a generic brand. (They also made the gay test that Xandir took in the previous episode, "Gay Bash".)

* The scene where Captain Hero sits in the shower, crying in shame, is a parody of The Crying Game.

* Toot says, "Pass me the Han Solo," and then eats what appears to be Han Solo frozen in carbonite at the end of The Empire Strikes Back and beginning of Return of the Jedi, scooping it up like ice cream. Due to her constant eating, Toot resembles Jabba the Hutt in this scene, complete with Xandir as Slave Princess Leia and Ling-Ling as .

* When Xandir explains purging to Toot, he tries to demonstrate with his sword, but explains that he doesn't have much of a gag reflex anymore. This is a reference to oral sex.

* Captain Hero quotes the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem "Tales of a Wayside Inn" while lamenting the breakup of his and Foxxy's relationship ("two ships passing in the night"). There is a particular irony here, as the part of the poem Captain Hero quotes laments a relationship with a lack of communication; in fact, Captain Hero and Foxxy's relationship had no communication, as it was based purely around bondage.

* When Clara yells at Wooldoor for his role in the slaughter of her woodland friends, at one point, he grabs her legs to plead with her and suddenly blurts out, "Are you as turned on as I am?". This is a reference to a famous episode of Cheers in which Sam and Diane are in the middle of a heated argument when Sam suddenly says, "Are you as turned on as I am?" to which Diane replies, "More!". The two then proceed to kiss passionately.

* After Toot has supposedly learned her lesson about bulimia, she turns to the camera and delivers the moral, whereupon the image freezes while a musical cue plays and the words "What You Already Know" come up on the screen. This is a parody of NBC's "The More You Know" public service announcements. They would be parodied again in several future episodes, including the next episode, "The Other Cousin."

* The title of this episode comes from Requiem for a Dream, a novel, and later a film, depicting the varying effects that drug addiction has on the lives of a group of people. This episode parodies the story, replacing drugs with food.

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See Also

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