Concrete Solution



TV Season: 1 Episode: 3.2 Writers: Warren Graff Ken Pontac David Winn Jeff Biancalana Kenn Navarro Director: Kenn Navarro Episode list: TV Season 1 Previous Episode: Doggone It Next Episode: Sea What I Found "Concrete Solution" is episode number 3.2 of the Happy Tree Friends television series.

Starring Roles

 * Nutty

Featuring Roles

 * Lumpy
 * Handy

Appearance Roles

 * Cuddles
 * Toothy
 * Giggles
 * The Mole
 * Sniffles
 * Russell
 * Cro-Marmot
 * Flaky
 * Mime
 * Lifty and Shifty
 * Pop
 * Cub

Plot
Handy drives his truck to the Happy Tree Cafe and manages to make it inside after some difficulty getting out of his truck. Giggles, the rollerblading waitress, delivers orders to the customers, which includes bacon and eggs to Handy and pancakes with syrup to Nutty. While Nutty drenches his pancakes in syrup, Giggles pours some coffee for Handy. He indicates that he'd like some sugar, but because the container is empty, Giggles has to get some more from the pantry. As Nutty happily chows down on his breakfast, he is awestruck upon seeing dozens of bags of sugar in the pantry. As to be expected, Nutty runs out of the cafe clutching a bag of sugar in his hands.

Elsewhere, at a construction site on an unfinished bridge, Handy, Lumpy, and The Mole get ready for work. Lumpy and The Mole punch their time cards, but Handy has difficulty doing this. While Handy and Lumpy begin mixing cement, The Mole guides a truck, carrying numerous metal support wires, backwards. In the back of the truck, a particularly sharp wire moves ever closer to The Mole's unseeing eye.

Meanwhile, Lumpy tries to nail two boards together with a nailgun, but nothing comes out. He looks directly into the barrel of the nail gun and squeezes the trigger but still, nothing comes out. He finally realizes that it isn't plugged in. Upon plugging it in, a nail shoots out and hits Handy in the back of the head. Handy falls face down in the wet cement, and when Lumpy's efforts to pull him out fail, he pushes Handy further into the cement. He then smoothes the cement and leaves his hand prints before running off.

At this time, Nutty comes running up, carrying his bag of sugar. He slips on the wet cement and falls face down on the ground, while the bag of sugar flies into a pile of bags of cement. When he gets up, Nutty grabs a bag of cement and hurries on his way. Lumpy returns now and unknowingly pours the bag of sugar into a cement mixer.

Back at Nutty's house, he puts a piece of cereal in a bowl and pours the bag of cement over it, still thinking he possesses sugar. After quickly eating the cement, his mouth becomes dry and twisted. He sees a glass of water and begins chugging it. Later, an ambulance sits outside his house, wherein Sniffles, the doctor, examines Nutty who lies on a gurney. Sniffles begins tapping a bulge in Nutty's stomach with a reflex hammer and lets out a triumphant, "Aha!"

Back at the newly constructed bridge, a line of cars waits for Lumpy to remove a barricade blocking the bridge. At the end of the line, just behind the truck with the metal support wires which have impaled The Mole's body in numerous places, Sniffles' ambulance pulls up. Lumpy removes the barricade and opens the road. Everyone on the bridge cheers, but it begins to rain. The sugar in the bridge begins melting as the water hits it, causing cars to lose their traction and swerve or stop.

The ambulance sways up and down as it moves forwards, causing Nutty's unstrapped gurney to roll back and forth. As Sniffles turns around to attempt to strap Nutty's gurney down, he slams into a car. Sniffles' head slams into the steering wheel where he is crushed, while Nutty flies out of the ambulance through the windshield. He hits Lumpy and knocks him off the bridge, while Nutty grabs onto the railing for dear life.

The concrete in Nutty's stomach begins weighing his body down, causing his lower half to fall off. His stomach is exposed and the concrete continues to pull down him down. Lumpy lands on the road below and as he tries to get up, he is run over by Lifty and Shifty's van. Panicking, they get out and try to help Lumpy, but upon finding his wallet they take his money and drive off.

While Nutty struggles to keep himself from falling, his tongue touches the rail of the bridge. Tasting the sugar, he enthusiastically begins to lick the railing. Back on the ground, Lumpy tries once again to stand up. This time a section of concrete falls on him, crushing his back. When the concrete falls forward to crush the rest of Lumpy's body, we see that the piece of the bridge that fell was the piece that Lumpy shoved Handy into earlier.

We cut back to Nutty who is still eating the bridge, now holding onto either side of the split bridge. Nutty eats the last section of the bridge keeping the two halves together, causing them to fall away from each other and tear Nutty in half. Nutty's stomach falls into Pop's car which is driving on the road beneath, crushing Cub. At the supermarket Pop puts a bag of sugar in the shopping cart where Nutty's stomach sits, wearing Cub's cap.

Moral
"Take the bitter with the sweet!"

Deaths

 * 1) The Mole is impaled through numerous parts of his body by numerous sharp metal wires.
 * 2) Handy is shot in the back of the head with a nailgun and then suffocates when he falls face first into wet cement.
 * 3) Sniffles' head is crushed when it slams into the steering wheel of his ambulence.
 * 4) Cuddles' car appears to be the one hit by Sniffles' ambulence, so it is possible he was killed in the crash.
 * 5) Toothy, Flaky, Russell, Mime, Cro-Marmot and several Generic Tree Friends die when their vehicles fall off the bridge (Mondo Media has comfirmed these deaths).
 * 6) Lumpy is crushed by a block of cement.
 * 7) Nutty is torn in half when he causes two halves of the bridge to break apart.
 * 8) Cub is crushed by Nutty's cement-filled stomach.

Goofs

 * 1) The candy on Nutty's body changes places numerous times, sometimes during continuous shots.
 * 2) Throughout most of the episode, Nutty's left eye is his lazy eye. This changes to his right eye, however, when he is in the ambulence, sliding around on the gurney. His eyes return to normal when he flies out of the ambulence.
 * 3) The directions of Lumpy's antlers change numerous times throughout the episode.
 * 4) When Handy and Nutty enter the cafe at the start of the episode, the door opens inwards. When Nutty runs off with the bag of sugar, however, the door opens outwards.
 * 5) In the cafe, Nutty doesn't have a fork when Giggles delivers his order, but he is later seen eating with one.
 * 6) When The Mole directs the truck backwards the pipes move towards his eyes from the front. When we see him impaled on the pipes later in the episode, he is impaled through the back of his head.
 * 7) The positions of the cars on and beneath the bridge change numerous times.
 * 8) Before Lumpy opens the bridge Toothy is seen in a car, but after the bridge collapses Toothy is seen dead in a tank truck. It is possible, however, that the one in the tanker may be a Generic Tree Friend as they generally tend to resemble Toothy without a tail and no tail was seen on the character in the tank truck and Toothy's car was seen in the background.
 * 9) When Lumpy is knocked off the bridge, he falls as though he is about to land on the grass, but falls on the road instead.
 * 10) Lumpy and the cement block with Handy in it disappears shortly after Lumpy dies.
 * 11) The cement was very flat at first, but changed to a thicker shape.
 * 12) The entire bridge melted as if it was made entirely out of sugar, even though Lumpy only used one bag.

Trivia

 * 1) As seen in the close-up when Lumpy looks inside the nail gun, Lumpy has blue eyes.
 * 2) The cereal Nutty has could be a reference to Nutty's brand of cereal, "Sugar Frosted Nutty Honey."
 * 3) When this episode aired along with Doggone It and Sea What I Found on YouTube, the alternate title for the conglomeration of the segments was named "The Third Degree."
 * 4) This is one of the few episodes where Lifty and Shifty survive. The other two are Ipso Fatso and Easy Comb, Easy Go.
 * 5) Handy's image in the cement may be a reference to Han Solo being incased in carbonite at the end of Star Wars: A New Hope and the beginning of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi.
 * 6) When Lumpy is crushed by the stone block, his screams are exactly the same as they are if you die on the Arcade Game Tightrope-A-Dope.