From A to Zoo

"From A to Zoo" is the first 7-minute episode of the Happy Tree Friends internet series and is separated in 2 parts. This is also the last episode of season two of the Happy Tree Friends internet series. Unlike the other short episodes, this long episode has over 38 storyboard artists and animators and was designed, animated and produced using flash animation and Toon Boom.

HTF's Episode Description
This is our first "extra long" episode, coming in at 7 minutes. As we started thinking about how we'd produce shows for the upcoming television series, we had to take a shot at a more complete episode, showcasing more characters and delving into their personalities. We first screened this piece at Comic-Con 2005 to an overwhelming reception. the crowd went nuts! We think it's a great story and the team has had a lot of fun continuing the process for the upcoming series.

Plot
Lumpy, the bus driver, parks his school bus outside a zoo. Taking attendance, he looks around to see Petunia, Cuddles, Toothy, and Sniffles are excited while Flaky looks around nervously. The group enters the zoo, holding hands and singing the Happy Tree Friends tune, and walks up to a sign designating where everything is. While Lumpy ponders what they should look at first, the others scatter and run off to various parts of the zoo. Noticing the kids are gone, Lumpy runs after them.

Cuddles and Toothy are standing at the baboon cage, poking it with a stick and laughing. The two run off when Sniffles approaches, camera in hand. Lumpy catches up to Sniffles who asks Lumpy to take his photo with the baboon. Lumpy has Sniffles back all the way up to the cage, so that his body is pressed up against the bars. When Lumpy takes the photo, the baboon is surprised and enraged by the flash and begins attacking Sniffles.

Lumpy looks around and spots a blowdart gun and two tranquilizer darts in a glass case. Standing next to the case is Petunia, eating an ice cream cone and watching Lumpy as he breaks the glass. Unfortunately, the glass shards fall on Petunia, piercing her face and causing her to scream in pain and stumble around. Lumpy is concerned by this, but quickly turns his attention back to Sniffles upon seeing that he's being torn to pieces by the baboon.

Lumpy aims the blowdart gun and fires a dart. He misses his mark and hits Petunia in the eye, causing her to stumble and fall into a snakepit. Lumpy quickly loads in the second dart, not realizing he's inserting it backwards. He takes a deep breath and ends up swallowing the dart, making him pass out.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Several hours later, Lumpy wakes up and runs over to the snakepit to save Petunia. She has been swallowed by a snake, and Lumpy jumps down to free her. After a brief struggle, Lumpy winds up getting eaten too. Fortunately, he is able to use his pen to cut the snake open and free himself. Unfortunately, the snake had already begun digesting Petunia, as she is smothered in stomach acid. Realizing there's nothing else he can do for her, Lumpy runs off to find the others.

Elsewhere, Toothy stands on all fours while Cuddles stands on his back and peers through a hole in a wooden fence. On the other side of the fence is a rhinoceros which Cuddles pokes with a stick through the hole in the fence. After getting no reaction, Cuddles attaches a knife to the end of the stick and begins poking the rhinoceros again. Still getting no reaction, Cuddles sticks a hot ring through the fence and burns a circle on the rhinoceros' skin, finally getting the animal's attention.

Lumpy runs up to the mischievous duo and Cuddles runs off, giving a mocking laugh. As Lumpy watches Cuddles leave, Toothy asks Lumpy to lift him up so he can see the rhinoceros through the fence. Sighing, Lumpy agrees, much to Toothy's delight. While running, Cuddles comes upon a helium tank used for inflating balloons and decides to have some fun. He inhales the helium and begins singing in a high-pitched voice.

Meanwhile, Lumpy hears Flaky scream in the distance. While he turns his attention away, he doesn't notice the sound of approaching footsteps or Toothy's head being impaled by the rhinoceros' horn through the fence. Determined to see what the problem is, Lumpy places a crate under Toothy's feet and runs off, still not aware that Toothy's head has been stabbed. The rhinoceros removes its horn from the fence and Toothy falls down, dead.

Flaky screams in terror as a baby chick cheeps and hops over to her. Lumpy runs over to tell her everything is okay, but he accidentally and unknowingly steps on the chick. This causes Flaky to start crying and screaming even more. Lumpy picks her up and runs off, stepping on and killing multiple chicks as he runs. At one point he slips, crushing numerous chicks and covering both himself and Flaky with blood and the remains of dead chicks.

Cuddles has finally had enough fun playing with the helium and starts to walk off. He stops when he sees the baboon, who has escaped from his cage and now plays with Sniffles' camera. He looks over at Cuddles and gets angry, wanting revenge for the humiliation he suffered earlier. Cuddles turns to run away, but he slams his eye into the nozzle of the helium tank. He is unable to get his eye free as helium flows from the tank to his head. His head slowly expands as his screams get higher and higher pitched until they stop altogether. Now dead, one of Cuddles' eyes begins to float up as though it were a long balloon.

The baboon runs off as Lumpy approaches, still carrying a traumatized Flaky. He sees the balloons and decides to get one for Flaky, Unknowingly, he grabs Cuddles' inflated eye, mistakes it for a balloon, and makes a balloon animal out of it. He hands it to Flaky who stops crying and smiles. He picks her up and carries her off, but she screams and passes out upon seeing Cuddles' body being dragged at the end of the nerve fibers connected to Cuddles' eye.

Back on the bus, an exhausted Lumpy plops down in the driver's seat and looks around, taking attendance again. He's surprised to see a dead Petunia, Cuddles, and Toothy, a traumatized Flaky, and the baboon holding Sniffles' camera and wearing his glasses. Lumpy shrugs and drives off. From outside the bus, we see a flash from the camera and the baboon starts screeching. Before the episode ends, we hear a crash.

Moral
"Don't bite the hand that feeds you!"

Deaths

 * 1) The baboon rips off Sniffles' organs.
 * 2) Petunia suffocates on the stomach acid of a snake.
 * 3) Lumpy slices the snake apart that ate Petunia.
 * 4) Toothy's head is impaled by a rhinoceros' horn.
 * 5) Numerous baby chicks are stepped on and crushed by Lumpy. Some are impaled on Flaky's quills.
 * 6) Cuddles' head fills up with helium, supposedly inflating his brain, or possibly Helium poisoning.
 * 7) Flaky, Lumpy, and the baboon may have died after their bus crashed. If they survived the crash, it's possible that the baboon killed them afterward. (debatable and not shown)

Goofs

 * 1) The directions of Lumpy's antlers change multiple times throughout the episode.
 * 2) Sniffles has a long trunk in the beginning of the episode, but in the photo Lumpy takes, Sniffles has a shorter trunk.
 * 3) The cage the baboon was in has its floor "floating" when Sniffles stands next to it.
 * 4) When Lumpy asks Sniffles to move toward the baboon cage, Lumpy has three fingers and a thumb. When he's doing the 'OK' signal, he has four fingers and a thumb. From that point onward, Lumpy only has three fingers and a thumb.
 * 5) There is a thud before Petunia hits the ground when she falls. It should've been heard when she hits the ground.
 * 6) When Lumpy grabs his throat you can see three hands. The third one isn't connected to an arm.
 * 7) When Lumpy falls down the background gets slightly darker.
 * 8) When Petunia is shown having started to be digested, she has her flower on her head. It fell off her when she fell into the snake pit and wasn't there when the snake first appeared(although it could have fallen on her before the snake started eating her).
 * 9) The rhinoceros' horn is too big to go through the hole, without taking a chunk out of the fence.
 * 10) When Lumpy is taking Flaky back to the bus, both his antlers are turned upwards.
 * 11) Sniffles' glasses are broken when he is attacked by the baboon, but the baboon is later seen wearing them (intact) while on the bus.
 * 12) In the bus, Lumpy has chicken blood on his chest, but it disappears when he slouches and then reappears when he sits up straight again.
 * 13) When the baboon puts on Sniffles' glasses his hand becomes blue, but changes back to its original color when the baboon lowers its arm.
 * 14) The dart in Petunia's eye disappears when Lumpy kills the snake, but it can be seen again when her body is on the bus at the end.
 * 15) The tape on Sniffles' glasses is missing when the baboon is holding them;it appears on his nose.Adding to this is the fact that the glasses go behind the tape when the baboon puts the glasses on, but the tape is too small, the frame is seen around the tape.
 * 16) When Cuddles is standing on Toothy's back, Toothy's tail is tinier.
 * 17) There is almost no way that the snake could have eaten the shards of glass on Petunia without getting severely injured.

Credits

 * Executive Producer: John Evershed
 * Producer: Julie Stroud
 * Editor: Zack Keller
 * Writers: Warren Graff, Jeff Biancalana, Kenn Navarro, Ken Pontac and David Winn
 * Associate Producer: Liz Stuart
 * Art, Storyboard & Animation Direction: Kenn Navarro
 * Storyboards: Lyla Warren, Jeff Biancalana, Alan Lau, Brad Rau, Jason Sadler, Roque Ballesteros, Rozanne Patruznick, Gregg Detrich, Stefan Fjedmark, Elaine Hultgren
 * Animators: Oliver DeGuia, Megan Prazenica, Marius Alecse, Andy Arett, Jack Shih, Lyla Warren, Jeff Biancalana, David Winn, Alan Lau, Brad Rau, Roque Ballesteros, Matt Danner, John Cimino, Mike Nassar, Eric Bauza, Martin Cendreda, Jason Sadler, Kristen McCormick, Brock Gallagher, Ed Skudder, Kris Lacore-Toscanini, Tuan Nguyen
 * Additional Animation: Scott Oberholtzer, Edward Artinian, Aaron Blecha, Igor Mederios, Lou Dockstader, Mike Milo, Sarah Forrester, Pascal Campion
 * Color Stylist: Jennifer Hansen
 * Backgrounds: Bradley J. Gake, Rafael Hurtado, Leticia Lacy
 * Technical Direction: Julie Stroud
 * Sound: Jim Lively
 * Music: Jerome Rossen
 * Voices: Kenn Navarro, David Winn, Nica Lorber, Dana Belben, Ellen Connell, Liz Stuart, Jeff Biancalana

Dedicated to all the talented animators out there making loads of wonderful cartoons.

(C) Mondo Mini Shows Inc. All Rights Reserved

Trivia

 * 1) This is the last time we see the characters with this design. Every episode afterwards, there's a new, improved design that matches the TV series.
 * 2) This is the second episode in which Lumpy is a bus driver. The first is Happy Trails pt. 1. Coincidentally, both episodes are season finales.
 * 3) Lumpy would later go camping with the same group (in addition to Nutty) in Take a Hike.
 * 4) The animal Lumpy makes out of Cuddles' eye is a rabbit, just like Cuddles.
 * 5) This episode and A Sucker For Love, Pt. 2 are the only internet episodes that are as long as the TV episodes.
 * 6) Despite Ellen Connell replacing her, this episode was the final time Dana Belben was creditied. Her voice could have been sampled though.
 * 7) Lumpy and/or Flaky are (debatably) the last characters to die in the second internet season.