A Hole Lotta Love

A Hole Lotta Love is episode number 7.2 of the Happy Tree Friends television series.

HTF Episode Description
Sniffles’ burrowing machine may not be the safest way to go to rescue Cub! (Part 1)

Find out at what depths Pop will sink to in order to recover little, lost Cub. (Part 2)

When Cub tumbles into a well, Sniffles builds a burrowing machine to rescue him. (DVD)

Plot
We begin with Pop and Cub walking through the park. While Pop taps out the ashes in his pipe, Cub wanders over to a broken down well. Pop sees this and barely manages to save Cub from falling in. Pop tells Cub to stay where he is, then follows Cub's gaze over to Cro-Marmot's ice cream truck. When Pop turns back around, however, Cub is gone, leaving only his beanie behind. Pop, fearing for the worst, begins tossing a rope down the well in hopes that Cub would grab on, coming up empty every time, until he drops it.



Pop runs over to a picnic table where Lumpy, Sniffles, and The Mole are reading and eating, demanding help. Sniffles gets an idea, smiles, and they all go to his workshop where the group begins working on a device, drawing up plans and welding metal. Lumpy, meanwhile, spends the entire time eating cans of beans. However, Lumpy eats so much beans, his stomach rumbles, and he is forced to run into a nearby outhouse.

The next day, Sniffles' creation, a large drill machine, crashes out of the workshop. They begin burrowing underground, but due to machine's flawed design (thanks to Pop's impatience), The Mole is instantly killed when a small glass bubble he rides in is crushed against the ground (because the glass dome he was in was bigger than the machine's body size, and that dome got destroyed when it entered the earth). Pop takes the map out of The Mole's dead hands, but is shocked to learn that the map The Mole drew up is nothing more than scribbles. Pop and Sniffles stop and ask Handy, who just finished laying some underground pipes, for directions to the well. Handy explains how to get there, pointing as he does. Due to his lack of hands, however, Pop can't understand where Handy is telling them to go. After Handy gets mad and yells at Pop for the confusion, Pop and Sniffles leave, destroying Handy's pipes in the process. Poisonous gas begins seeping out through the pipes quickly and Handy, unable to turn the valve to turn off the gas due to the lack of hands, falls down dead after being succumbed to the poisonous gas.

Back in the machine, Pop's hastiness has taken him over, and now he and Sniffles are seen fighting over the steering wheel, causing them to burrow in random directions and jump out of the ground in several places. In the middle of the street, Mime is seen riding his unicycle while juggling three balls. To his horror, he notices the fin of the machine chasing him. Mime pedals away in fear, eventually relaxing when the fin goes back underground. He looks up to see, however, that Petunia is blindly driving straight at him (Petunia doesn't notice, as she looking downwards). Mime braces himself for the impact, when the fin reemerges and cuts Petunia's car (and Petunia herself) in half, leaving Mime unharmed. One of the sliced halves of Petunia's car knocks down the garbage cans in front of Cuddles' house. Hearing the noise, Cuddles opens a window in his house, and gives a shocked stare at the damage he's seeing.

As Pop and Sniffles continue their struggle for control of the vehicle, the steering wheel breaks off, thus preventing them to control the machine. The machine pops out of the ground and goes back underground, the force of the impact causing Mime to fly up in the air. He lands perfectly and throws the three balls he's juggling at the door to Cuddles' house, as if he was knocking. When Cuddles comes outside, Mime tries in vain to explain to Cuddles what's happening, but due to his silence, Cuddles is unable to understand Mime's movements. Suddenly, the fin of the machine comes by and slices off the front portion of Cuddles' house, which begins to fall over. As Cuddles and Mime attempt to run away, the portion of the house that crashes on top of them were the windows. Mime is unharmed, as the window that crashed on him was opened by Cuddles earlier. However, Cuddles isn't so lucky, as the window that crashed on him was closed. As a result, the glass from the window slices the unlucky rabbit into six equal sized pieces like a sliced apple.

Sniffles and Pop try to replace the steering wheel on the controls, but the machine hits an underground wall of concrete. The drill becomes stationary in the rock, but since the machine is still moving, everything gets reversed: now the machine starts spinning, but the drill isn't. Inside, Pop and Sniffles are getting tossed around. Pop manages to get into the drivers seat. Sniffles, on the other hand still continues to get tossed around. To make matters worse, cans of beans from a cupboard (probably Lumpy's idea to put it there) begin to fall out and bounce all over the place. Sniffles ends up getting pierced all over his body by the cans of beans and is finally killed when two pierce his eyes. Pop successfully stops the machine from spinning and everything that was bouncing around falls to the floor. Hearing Sniffles' body hit the floor, Pop looks at the dead carcass, and becomes grossed out by it appearance, making him shudder. Pop, now gaining the upper hand, sets the drill in reverse, and the machine gets set free.

Back at the well, it is revealed that Cub never fell into the well at all, as he is seen skipping along holding an ice cream bar just before he retrieves his beanie. The drill then comes out of the ground, and Pop is happy than nothing bad happened to his son. The machine begins driving towards Cub, but Pop is concerned that Cub might get run over by it. He goes to the top of the machine where The Mole was earlier, and tosses an over-sized anchor to stop the machine. Mime, now out of breath and moving very slow, ends up getting his head crushed by the anchor. The machine stops just short of running over Cub, but Pop accidentally knocks Cub down the well when he opens the door. Realizing what he just did, Pop lets out a sigh of exasperation, goes back into the machine, and starts it up again, ready to begin the search all over again.

Meanwhile, Lumpy still sits in the outhouse with a newspaper in hand. Suddenly, the ground begins shaking, and the drill pops up from the bottom of the outhouse, and Lumpy then gets shredded to death.

Moral
"Anything worth doing is worth doing well!"

Deaths

 * 1) The Mole's head is bashed and explodes when the drill machine enters the Earth.
 * 2) Handy breathes poisonous gas and gets intoxicated.
 * 3) Petunia gets sliced in half by the drill machine's fin.
 * 4) A closed window falls on Cuddles, dismembering him.
 * 5) Various cans of beans pierce Sniffles' body, killing him.
 * 6) An anchor impales Mime's head.
 * 7) Cub dies when he falls down the well at the end of the episode. (Debatable)
 * 8) Lumpy is shredded to death by the drill machine.

Goofs

 * 1) The Mole's mole changes places a few times, once during a continuous shot.
 * 2) The tools on Handy's belt change places numerous times.
 * 3) The trash on Cuddles' lawn disappears when the front of his house begins to fall over.
 * 4) At the end of the episode, Cub is about to be run over as he is by the treads of the drill machine. In the next shot, however, he is by the door (though he may have just moved there to see Pop).
 * 5) Cub ran off to get ice cream, while Sniffles took a day to create the drill machine. At the end of the episode, Cub had only just gotten his (still frozen) ice cream (though it is possible that during the time-span of the episode, he went to get another one).
 * 6) When Pop nearly runs Cub over, the well is facing away from the drill machine, but when he opens the door (and knocks Cub in), the well (it's hole) is facing them.
 * 7) It is unknown how Cub was able to afford the ice cream, since Pop wasn't there as he was looking for Cub in the drill machine (perhaps Cro-Marmot offered him ice cream because he was an infant?).
 * 8) Petunia has more of an appearance role.
 * 9) Just before Petunia is split in half, the two sides of her body are already split.Petuniasplit.png
 * 10) Judging by the size of the anchor, it should have been impossible for Pop to pull it out of the small hole.
 * 11) Pop and Sniffles get pressed against the screen before they hit the underground rock.
 * 12) Lumpy shouldn't have screamed as long as he did, during his death.

Trivia

 * Strange, but true: The entire plot of the episode has irony within it. Pop did all he could to rescue his beloved son, as he believed that he fell down a hole, and yet, Cub was completely unharmed. However, at the end of the episode, Pop unintentionally causes Cub to fall down for real, which displays that Pop's efforts have gone to waste (a similar occurrence is later seen in Clause For Concern).
 * The Cursed Idol is among the items that fall out of Cuddles' trash can.
 * Character revelation: Pop can be impatient, which is shown when he constantly kept sharpening The Mole's pencil every time it broke, speeding up Sniffles' welding, when he pushes everybody into the drill the instant it's complete, and when he began to fight with Sniffles over control of the steering wheel. (This is most likely because he desperately wanted to save Cub)
 * When the drill machine crashes into the concrete wall, you can see a pentagram.
 * Kenn Navarro mentioned that he did Handy's voice in this episode due to Warren Graff being unavailable at the time.
 * The noise Cuddles made when he opened the window is the exact same when he rescued Mittens in a tree from Who's to Flame?.
 * Lumpy didn't kill or harm anybody in this episode, while still being killed himself.
 * He is also strangely addicted to beans in this episode, as he is seen eating many cans while the others are building the drill.
 * This is the second TV episode to have Mime spend the whole episode running away from a large machine with a pointy tip. The first is As You Wish.
 * Pop is responsible for every death in this episode.
 * This is one of three TV episodes in which Petunia appears in but Giggles doesn't, the other two being Take a Hike and Wishy Washy.
 * When this episode aired along with A Change of Heart and Mime to Five on YouTube, the alternate title for the trio of segments was named "Seventh Heaven". Cuddles, Mime, Petunia, Cro-Marmot, The Mole and Lumpy appear in all 3 episodes. Lumpy (Debatably) dies in all three episodes, Cuddles and The Mole die twice, Petunia and Mime die once, and Cro-Marmot survives all three.
 * When Handy was in the tunnel and the drill broke the wall, he clearly said "What the...?".
 * If Cub survived falling into the well, this episode marks the second time Pop killed another character without killing Cub. The first time is in Every Litter Bit Hurts.
 * In order aired on TV, this is the first episode to be uploaded by Mondo Media to YouTube in HD.
 * When Cuddles opened the door and saw Mime, he said "Can/May I help you?".
 * The way Pop said "Hold on, son!" at the beginning of the episode sounded exactly like the way he said it in Water Way to Go.
 * Handy, The Mole, and Lumpy die in the same order they did in Concrete Solution, Don't Yank My Chain, and Pet Peeve.
 * The same skeleton seen in Sea What I Found is briefly seen in the part that shows you how out of control the drill got as Pop and Sniffles fought for control.
 * This episode shows that The Mole is left-handed when he works on the drilling map.
 * The scene where Mime survives the facade of a house falling on him and Cuddles (who dies) is reminiscent of Buster Keaton's stunt, in which he too survives a house facade falling on him, which can be seen in the silent film Steamboat Bill Jr. and on a smaller scale in One Week.
 * The YouTube thumbnail for Part 2 spoils Mime's death.
 * When Cuddles looks at the garbage on his front lawn after opening the window, if you look really closely, you can see a severed eye sitting behind The Cursed Idol.
 * The same eyeball will make a short cameo in A Sight for Sore Eyes.