Swelter Skelter



Swelter Skelter is an episode of the Happy Tree Friends internet series.

Starring Roles

 * Lifty & Shifty

Featuring Roles

 * Nutty
 * Petunia
 * Giggles
 * Cro-Marmot

Plot
It's an incredibly hot day at the playground as Lifty and Shifty pant on the swings, Petunia fans herself and sighs, and Giggles slides down the slide, melting her backside due to the heat.

Nutty then casually walks by, holding a snow cone, and giggling to his heart's content. Lifty and Shifty spy the frozen treat and decide to steal it from him. Shifty taps on Nutty's shoulder from behind to get his attention. As the brothers laugh, Nutty gasps and starts to back away. As Nutty backs away, Shifty places his leg behind him, tripping Nutty onto the ground, breaking open his skull. His brain then fries due to the heat and turns golden brown like an egg. Shifty attempts to grab the snowcone in the air, but only succeeds in grabbing the cone. The ice falls out and instantly dries up on the ground.

The brothers are disappointed by their loss when Cro-Marmot's ice cream truck pulls up. Cro-Marmot lets the brothers in his ice cream truck and drives them to his own private hotel room, which, like his house, is kept at a cold temperature.

At first, Lifty and Shifty think it is paradise, but soon realize not when they discover their drinks are completely frozen. They then don winter coats due to the extreme cold and to make matters worse, it begins to snow inside the room. Lifty and Shifty try to leave only to find the door frozen shut.

Thinking quickly, Lifty tries to use a blowtorch to melt the ice around the door. It is so cold, however, that the flame freezes solid and falls off the torch. Gas still spouts from the torch as a confused Shifty picks up the solid fire only to have it unfreeze in his warm mittens.

Shifty screams and unknowingly places his hands in front of the blowtorch, which is still spewing gas, causing an explosion of ice. The decapitated Lifty is now encased in the massive ice block. Shifty is luckily alive, only a few inches separate him from the sharp points of the ice. He sighs at his good fortune, but slips on his brother's blood at his feet and impales himself in the eye and tongue on the ice, killing him.

Cro-Marmot, his room almost one big ice block, has gotten a drink inside of his ice block, now himself thinking this place is paradise.

Moral

 * "Don't sweat the small stuff"

Deaths

 * 1) Nutty's head is cracked open falling over Shifty's leg, and his brain is cooked in the heat.
 * 2) Lifty is impaled by a propane, 'ice" explosion.
 * 3) Shifty slips on Lifty's blood, and is impaled by an icicle from the explosion.

Goofs

 * 1) Cro-Marmot's club switches hands several times.
 * 2) The size of Nutty's brain in this episode contradicts the size of his brain in Easy Comb, Easy Go
 * 3) When Shifty trips Nutty, Shifty's leg was too long, however that might just be a cartoonish effect.
 * 4) Shifty's mittens were on fire, making him the one most likely to be destroyed in the explosion.
 * 5) When Shifty is on the swing at the start, he had four fingers and a thumb.
 * 6) Shifty's mittens disappear when he is trying to open the door.
 * 7) The couch, Lifty was sitting on, changes position when Shifty turns the cup upside down.
 * 8) Considering the position and size of Lifty's whiskers, the top of them should've been visible when he was wearing his scuff.
 * 9) There is a slight typo in the opening to the episode. The storybook reads "Staring", while it should read "Starring".

Trivia

 * 1) The title of this episode is a reference to Helter Skelter, which was originally a poem written by British poet Jonathan Swift. Today, it is most famously known as The Beatles' song of the same name.
 * 2) This is the first internet episode to star Lifty and Shifty since Milkin' It.
 * 3) This episode features one of only three instances in the entire series, that Lifty dies before Shifty. The other episodes are Milkin' It and Who's to Flame?.
 * 4) Both "versions" of the Lifty & Shifty laugh are heard in this episode. The lower pitched version by Mark Giambruno and the current higher pitched laugh by Kenn Navarro.