From A to Zoo is an episode of the Happy Tree Friends internet series, the twenty-seventh and final episode of the second season, and fifty-fourth overall.
HTF 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[]
Part One[]
The episode begins with Lumpy, the school bus driver, parking his school bus outside a zoo. Taking attendance, he looks around to see Petunia, Cuddles, Toothy, Sniffles and Flaky, all excited for a day at the zoo (except Flaky, who is nervous as usual). The group enters the zoo, holding hands and singing a familiar 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 by the baboon cage, poking the baboon with a stick and mocking it. The two run off laughing when Sniffles approaches, camera in hand. An exhausted 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 flash from the bulb startles the baboon, and henceforth, the ferocious baboon begins to rip Sniffles apart.
Lumpy looks around and spots a blow dart gun and two tranquilizer darts in a glass case. Standing next to the case is Petunia, who is eating an ice cream cone. Lumpy runs up to the case, grabs the little hammer hanging from the box, and gives it a hard swing. Unfortunately, the glass shards end up piercing Petunia all over her face, making her scream in extreme agony. Realizing he has two problems to deal with now, Lumpy focuses his attention towards Sniffles when the baboon begins tearing him limb from limb. He quickly shoves a dart into the blow dart gun, and aims it at the baboon. He shoots the dart, but the baboon does not stop his rampage. It turns out that Lumpy hit Petunia, who was stumbling in pain due to the glass shards piercing her face. Because of this, she ends up falling into a snake pit, where a snake advances on her.
Lumpy once more tries to knock out the baboon, but as he is too panicked to pay attention, he unknowingly places the dart into the blow dart gun backwards. He takes a big breath, but the suction of his inhale causes the dart to fly right into his throat, making him choke and eventually faint.
Part Two[]
Several hours later, Lumpy wakes up, yawning and scratching himself (like he always would after sleeping) with the effects of the dart apparently wearing off. Suddenly, he remembers that Petunia fell into the snake pit, and goes to check on her. Unfortunately, the snake that advanced on Petunia has already eaten her, and is in mid-digestion. Lumpy jumps into the pit to save her, and after a brief struggle, he 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 that there is nothing else that 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 sharpens the end of the stick and begins poking the rhinoceros again. Still getting no reaction, Cuddles sticks a branding iron through the fence and brands 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 him 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, begins singing in a high-pitched voice, and laughs about it.
Meanwhile, Lumpy hears Flaky shriek in the distance. He turns to see what is going on, not noticing the sound of approaching footsteps or Toothy's head being impaled by the rhinoceros's horn through the fence. Determined to see what the problem is, he 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 is now seen bellowing in terror as a cute little baby chick cheeps and hops over to her, trying to get some love. Lumpy runs over to tell her that everything is okay, but he accidentally and unknowingly steps on the chick. This causes Flaky to start yelling even more. Lumpy picks her up and runs off, stepping on and killing multiple chicks as he runs. He soon 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 is now playing with Sniffles' camera. The baboon looks over at Cuddles and gets angry, wanting revenge for the humiliation he suffered earlier. Cuddles turns to run away, but 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. Cuddles now dead, one of his 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 and makes a balloon animal out of it. He hands it to Flaky, who stops crying and slowly smiles. He picks her up and carries her off. Unfortunately, Flaky realizes that the "balloon" she is holding is the nerve of Cuddles' eye, and because of this, she gives one last scream just before passing out.
Back on the bus, an exhausted Lumpy plops down in the driver's seat and looks around, taking attendance again. He is surprised to see Petunia, Cuddles, and Toothy laying dead, a traumatized Flaky, and the baboon holding Sniffles' camera. Lumpy looks suspiciously at the baboon until it puts Sniffles' glasses on. Lumpy shrugs, either thinking that the baboon is Sniffles or not caring, and drives off. From outside, a silhouette of the bus is shown. Seconds later, a bright light flashes from the camera through the bus's windows and the baboon begins screeching. As the iris closes in completely, the bus crashes off screen.
Moral[]
"Don't bite the hand that feeds you!"
Deaths[]
- The baboon rips out Sniffles' organs.
- Petunia gets digested by a snake (most specifically Python), and the stomach acid deteriorates her body.
- After getting eaten by the same snake that ate Petunia, Lumpy uses a pen to free himself, ripping apart the snake's body.
- Toothy's head is impaled by a rhinoceros's horn.
- Numerous baby chicks are stepped on and crushed by Lumpy. Three are impaled on Flaky's quills.
- Cuddles' head fills up with helium, inflating his brain, or possibly killing him from helium poisoning.
- Flaky, Lumpy, and the baboon may have died after their bus crashed. If they survived the crash, it is possible that the baboon killed them afterward. (Debatable and death not shown)
Injuries[]
- Sniffles gets his eye and arm torn off by the baboon.
- Petunia's face is impaled by shards of glass.
- Petunia is shot in the eye by a tranquilizer.
- Petunia falls into a snake pit.
- Lumpy knocks himself out after accidentally inhaling a tranquilizer dart.
- Lumpy wrestles with a snake and ends up getting eaten alive.
Survival Rate[]
- Amount of surviving main characters: 2 (0 including Debatable deaths)
- Amount of dead main characters: 4 (6 including Debatable deaths)
- Total rate: 33.33% (0% including Debatable deaths)
Destruction[]
- Sniffles' glasses are broken by the baboon.
- A dart is swallowed by Lumpy.
- Lumpy crashes a school bus at the end of the episode.
Goofs[]
- The directions of Lumpy's antlers change multiple times throughout the episode.
- Toothy's buck teeth repeatedly switch over from his buck teeth to regular buck teeth.
- When he leads the characters into the zoo, Lumpy does not appear to really hold Petunia's hand at all.
- Most of the empty cages in this episode have bars only up front (from the viewer's point of view).
- When Lumpy asks Sniffles to move towards the baboon cage, Lumpy has three fingers and a thumb. When he does the 'OK' signal, he has four fingers and a thumb. From that point onward, Lumpy only has three fingers and a thumb.
- When Sniffles' picture is taken, his pocket protector has switched to the left side of his chest and it stays there as he's being torn apart by the baboon.
- Sniffles is seen with a shorter snout in the photo Lumpy takes, as if he was in his TV Series design and the future episodes.
- When Petunia falls into the snake pit, a thud can be heard before she hits the ground.
- When Lumpy grabs his throat you can see three hands. The third one is not connected to an arm.
- When Petunia is shown having started to be digested, she has her flower on her head, despite how it fell off her when she fell into the snake pit and was not there when the snake first appeared. It is possible that it could have fallen on her before the snake started eating her.
- Petunia's dead body has circular pupils. Later when Flaky screams at the sight of Cuddles' corpse her pupils become circular.
- 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.
- When Cuddles is standing on Toothy's back, Toothy's tail is smaller than normal.
- When Lumpy appears, Cuddles runs away and his branding iron falls right before Toothy, but in the next scene, the branding iron is gone.
- When Lumpy lifts Toothy up, Toothy's buck teeth are shown to be detached.
- The rhinoceros' horn is too big to go through the hole without taking a chunk out of the fence.
- Moreover, the rhinoceros' horn should have pierced Toothy's right eye, but instead, it pierces his forehead.
- When Toothy is impaled by the horn of the rhinoceros, the horn does not have any blood on it. But when the rhino takes it out, blood abruptly appears.
- Cuddles' philtrum disappears when he sees the baboon with a camera.
- When the baboon runs away after killing Cuddles, the camera disappears, but later, it reappears during the bus scene at the end.
- When Flaky is screaming in the chicken farm, her right arm is detached.
- During the scene where Lumpy is running with Flaky as he crushes the chicks, many of the chicks clip through each other.
- Unless Lumpy was careful (which is far from plausible), he should have gotten pierced by Flaky's quills.
- When Lumpy is taking Flaky back to the bus, both his antlers are turned upwards. They should be pointing in opposite directions.
- 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. This is in one online version of the episode, as it has been corrected in future releases.
- At the very end, the baboon's nose quickly goes over the camera it is holding, then quickly goes behind it as it should.
- When the baboon puts on Sniffles' glasses, his hand becomes blue (like Sniffles' or Lumpy's color), but it changes back to its original color when the baboon holds the arm. (Fixed in the Classics Remastered version)
- Sniffles' glasses are broken when he is attacked by the baboon, but the baboon is later seen wearing them (intact) while on the bus.
- A weird glitch happens at the end of part 2. The glitch shows the chick slaughter scene.
Quick Shot Moment[]
Part 1: When Petunia stumbles backwards before she falls into the snake pit, there is a brief shot of her screaming in agony from the glass shards impaling her face.
Part 2: After Lumpy accidentally steps on the chick that made Flaky scream in fear, there is a brief shot of Cuddles with the helium nozzle in his eye. This almost spoils Cuddles' death.
Note: Both of these are fixed in the Classics Remastered versions for the first and the second parts.