TAKE ME TO THE PICTURES

EPISODE TYPE: Mutation & Godzilla Situation
(see Common Themes section for more on this category)

WHAT IS PEEPI?: A non anthro, non furry, pet hamster

IS HE MACRO ORIGINALLY?: No        

HOW DID HE BECOME MACRO?: Mutated through alien technology and absoring energy from a nuclear power plant

MACRO NAME: (If different from regular sized name) Ultra Peepi

QUOTE:      (NONE--Non Furry and incapable of speech)

SEX:    Male

LOCATIONS: Skool, City

MACRO SIZE (Approx or Average ): 150  feet

NATURE: Chaotic Animalistic Behavior

DESTRUCTION LEVEL DONE: High -- Many buildings and vehicles and parts of the city were destroyed

SYNOPSIS OF EPISODE: The class is sitting in the classroom at skool looking at the newest addition. A pet hamster named Peepi.  The whole class seems to find him adorable except for Zim who is freaked out by the cute creature in its hamster tank.  Dib as usual confronts Zim on his reaction to the hamster as Zim tries to say that he is not bothered by the creature. Dib tells him that Earth people find hamsters cute and adorable not scary.  Zim suddenly realizes that he can use that to his advantage and starts to day dream. He sees himself sitting atop the head of a giant sized Peepi as everyone who sees him can't help but to bow in submission due to the cuteness of the creature.  Zim snaps out of it as the teacher is telling them that the hamster on the spinning wheel is what they have to look forward to in their own lives in the corporate world. Zim just grins on a plan that came to him.

Night falls at the school  and Zim shows up to scare a sleeping Peepi. The next morning no one but Dib seems to notice that there is something strange going on with Peepi. He has some strange device on his back and barely fits in his cage.  Zim decides it may be time to act on his plan but before he can the large  hamster has already left the cage he was in and digs through the floor and pushes through the wall to the outside. He runs over to the fense and eats a piece of it only to get slightly larger and continues to flee. Zim chases after him urging him on to get stronger. The hamster grows even bigger and walks through the side of a building heading towards a nuclear power plant.  Zim orders him to obay him but the hamster doesn't seem to be listening. He gets even bigger and mutates into a monsterous godzilla like form after out growing the power plant.  A news cast starts to report of the now newly named "Ultra Peepi" on the rampage as scores of citizens run and aww up at it in panic as it destroys everything and crushes the very news building reporting the story. Zim continues to tell it to obay only for it to ignore him.  Zim decides that its not so bad for the giant Peepi to destroy things as that is what Zim wants in the long run anyway so just lets the monster take over without any more interference form him.

In a nearby army bunker the soldiers are arguing over how to deal with the creature as none of them is willing to fire a weapon at such a cute creature as that. Dib runs in and tells them all that it's not just a regular mutated hamster but one altered by alien technology. The general of the army seems interested and wants to know how to stop such a thing, when Dib can't answer that he orders him thrown out of there.  Zim heads back to his house and goes to watch tv with his robotic helper Gir. The house starts to shake as a news report tells of the giant approaching and that if he gets his paws on a supply of hamster pelots he will become unstoppable. Zim charges out of the house ordering Peepi to stop. When Peepi doesn't listen Zim jumps into a space ship that shoots out of his house and starts to attack Peepi. The giant hamster uses fire breath on the ship to cause Zim to crash through various buildings.  Dib goes over to example the knocked out alien pondering whether he should help him or not. Before he can decide Gir arrives and carries him off to safety. Zim tells Dib that he will stop the hamster but not to help Earth or the humans. Ultra Peepi heads towards the pellet plant and crushes a tank or two along the way. Zim uses a tractor beam to lift up a giant store in the shape of a hot dog to attract  the hamster. The army fires on it as well thinking its an attack by giant hot dogs now. The hamster stomps into an amusment park where the hot dog has been placed in a ferris wheel. The hamster starts to eat the ferris wheel as the army shows up. Dib tells them not to interfere with the aliens plans and they just put Dib in a crazy can to keep him out of the way.  Zim hooks up some rocket packs to the hamster and sends him out into orbit. A kid crying wonders why and Zim has no idea. But tells him that he will live on with the stars now only for the hamster to crash down in the distance in a huge explosion.

REVIEW OF EPISODE: A fun episode that really handled the monster on the loose genre,  in a situation that worked well. Peepi was a great choice for a monster as it played up on the whole cute factor, that has been done before. But this time the monster was anything but cute, he was deadily and quite the terror at that. I'm not a big fan of the show I have to admit. I have seen about every episode and do get the humor and idea behind it, but overall it's just not to my tastes. I try not to review things on just what I like overall but on what makes for a fun situation. While the whole story of this stupid alien who can't get anything done due to some earth kid who is always trying to stop him doesn't do it for me, this episode did a great job for any macro situation and that alone makes this a must see as it's hard to find a good post 2000 macro cartoon episode for some reason.

Some of the best parts were the humor that filled the episode. The most obvious was the name they choose for the hamster itself. Peepi. The jokes were kinda obvious but fun as well. The best line I thought had to be when the general says "Oh no. Now we are being attacked by giant weiners!" you figure out the humor of that for yourself folks. Good stuff though. I'm not one to find pee jokes funny, but it worked in this situation. Great use of a name to be a device to play off of. The cuteness of the hamster monster was another thing that was played heavily off of in the name of humor as well. The joke kinda has been done in a comic I have up on the site, namely the Ambush Bug one with the giant Koala. Same situation here, where everyone is so in awe of the cutness of the creature that they forget to realize it is a giant on the loose destroying everything in it's path. But it works well enough and it's not like this was the most original idea anyway being that it's a Godzilla spoof in the first place.  The military was afraid to attack it because it was too cute  and everyone just stood there as it stomped em flat so taken in by it's cuteness. So it worked well here but again it wasn't the most original way to go about things. For this cartoon though it was a pleasent surprise to see. Another funny moment I liked was after Peepi entered a nuclear power plant he suddenly grows into a Godzilla creature . A newscast breaks out and they quickly name him "Ultra-Peepi" as the newscast is going on the giant actualy steps on the very news station building doing the broadcast. I thought that was a nice touch. Even the ending ended with the hamster being rocket boosted into space only to crash in the distance in a huge explosion.

The real drawbacks of this episode was the animation style. At one moment Peepi was drawn with rectangles for eyes and then after he becomes Ultra Peepi he has circle eyes. The rest of the characters were drawn in this weird  style of little limbs on bodies and weird color schemes throughout the whole cartoon. I just don't like the style a lot of cartoon series on cable use. But I didn't get why he should have normal eyes all of the sudden when he wasn't normal at all anymore. Just a lot of things in the various episodes are too much power gamish. Meaning that they can do it because we have to believe they have the technology to do so. So Zim can just hook some device up to a hamster and make it grow and thats all that matters. Some of his growth moments were shown but it was really just his final stages after he changes into his Ultra Peepi form after entering the power plant in the distance. So that too could have been better.

Overall though its pretty good besides the few minor drawbacks. Peepi is one bad hamster who takes full advantage of his power and size. He wasn't afraid to blow fire on Zim who foolishly though he could control one as powerful as he. Or stomp people in his way or bash buildings down because he could. If there was a loving and gentle hamster in there, he was long gone due to his power hungry ways.  Its fun and its pretty much the whole episode as well. So it wasn't something quickly thrown on us only to be defeated moments later. Its not often a hamster gets such a role and it's good to see how it was handled by him. Fans of the series (which there are a lot of ) will enjoy this as it fits right into the series. If you aren't a fan and just like huge monsters on the loose, then this episode is also for you.  It was handled welland I only wish they had done more macro moments in the series run, but this one was one of the better ones done in the past 5 years or so, where macro moments have been more limited. Definitely check it out at least just for a good chuckle.

RATING:   B+

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FINAL NOTES:

*This episode was only shown a few times before it was banned from the air after the events of September 11, 2001. The carnage and destruction of buildings that Peepi causes in this episode, was seen by executives of Nick as too close to resemble the devistation of the events of that day that it was felt that this episode should no longer be shown. Whenever this episode was scheduled to be aired, it was always replaced by a differnet episode.  Eventualy it was shown on the air again but by that time the show was already cancelled with no new episodes being made.

*While in most cartoon episodes if not almost all, there are no deaths caused by the monster, that is far from the case of this episode. Over 50 people wound up being killed by Ultra-Peepi at various points. They made no secret of hidding the deaths and the pleasure that the giant hamster took in finishing off the ones who got in his way. A true sign in how much cartoons have truly changed as more have become cable only toons.

      Continuity -- Zim and Gir are both eating Pixie Sticks on the couch as Peepi is taking over. A huge crash is heard and they show the sticks in their hands again but now there are three instead of two sticks in the box they were pulling them from.

      Continuity -- Peepi's size fluxuated at many times in this. While he was supposed to get bigger as the episode went on, he was much smaller in comparison at later moments then he was earlier.

       Continuity -- There is a moment when Ultra-Peepi is approaching Zim's base and Zim steps outside. He hears a stomping  and turns his head to look. They zoom out showing Peepi. in the bottom of the shot, Zim is standing there, and he has his disguise on, but he did not have it when he ran outside

      Animation --  When the security device on the hamster cage is first opened by the teacher at the start of the episode, four kids are looking on in awe as the hamster is revealed to the class. One of the kids is drawn with only three fingers while the other three have four fingers.

+ :Giang Godzillaesque Hamster on the loose! Funny moments and situations that make it a pleasurable watch. Interesting choice in monster as there are not many giant hamster moments out there.

- :Poor animation style for the most part.  Some silly situations that didn't work as well as they could have. Not the most original idea to be done in an episode.

PICTURES OF PEEPI