The 2008 version was three episodes in and I was already losing interest. You know you’re running on fumes when one of your episode ideas is a music video for “I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts”. I was particularly uninterested in the whole family dynamic and wanted more variety with the characters. I’m not sure, this was so long ago I don’t exactly remember.
Either way, I decided the best course of action was to completely reboot the series with a mostly new cast.
The gang decides to go see a movie at their local theater. Because I couldn’t draw cars, they drive a bus which Louis crashes into another car on purpose, which launches the whole gang into the air, only for them to conveniently land in front of the theater. They head for the concession stand where they meet Mr. Chocolate, in his very first appearance in a cartoon. He gives them their concessions by excreting them from his mouth, accompanied by a long, drawn-out fart noise, which I assume didn’t help people not think he was a turd, rather than a mass of edible chocolate like he was intended to be.
In the theater itself, the gang sits down and watches The Marshmallow Debacle, which appears to be a kaiju movie starring a giant marshmallow. Louis, who earlier admitted to being on hallucinogenic drugs, declares The Marshmallow Debacle to be the best movie he’s ever seen before the episode ends.
As you can probably tell, Theater Frenzy really wasn’t a good episode to start with. The only thing that got introduced in this “introductory episode” was Mr. Chocolate.
Yeah, I’m not sure why I spelled “kiddies” with an apostrophe either.
Steve and Mr. Happy are sitting on the couch, watching a parody of Barney and Friends, which at this point was a pretty old-hat thing to parody. In this show, an orange dinosaur with both arms amputated gets pissed off at his child audience, and mows them down with a machine gun that he randomly has. Steve. understandably horrified at what he just witnessed, decides to take matters into his own hands and sets out to create a children’s show.
Later at some random warehouse we never see them rent out, Steve and his crew are all set up to start filming. The unnamed kids show seems to consist of a puppet named Dr. Squirrel - a parody of Colgate mascot and YouTube Poop icon Dr. Rabbit - asking guest star Mr. Chocolate if he wants to “be his own dentist”. This only causes Mr. Chocolate to get confused, and angrily walk off the set. After some other shenanigans that I fail to remember, the entire set somehow catches fire in the only moment where Fire had anything to do with actual combustion.
After escaping the flames, Steve and Louis and immediately confronted by a random executive from “Malt Whiskey Pictures”, who wishes to turn their unfinished, unreleased show into a movie. The two accept the deal and we later see a bit of the end product, seemingly titled “This is a Movie!”. It features Dr. Squirrel once again, who is still on fire.
If there was a point when Fire jumped the shark, it would definitely be Growing Up.
This waste of an episode starts off with Louis paying a visit to his neighbor, an unnamed scientist. The scientist rambles on about what he’s currently working on, while Louis’s head floats away for no reason other than I couldn’t bear for an episode to go five seconds without Louis being OH SO WACKY.
After ruining the scientist’s introduction, Louis steals a potion he created and brings it home, where Steve asks him to babysit Mr. Happy. Louis proceeds to feed Mr. Happy the potion, apparently not giving a rat’s ass about his safety, and rocks him to sleep. Steve returns home later to find that his son is no longer a baby bean thing - he’s now a teenager bean with arms, legs, and the ability to talk.
Steve confronts Louis and asks him what the hell is going on, to which Louis gives no clear answer. He instead chooses to go outside and mess with his neighbor Ball Man by pretending he’s a detective. In a surprisingly rare moment of toilet humor, Louis ends the episode by farting on Ball Man’s garden and trying to charge him for it.
To put it bluntly, this episode sucked ass. Not only was Louis at his most annoying since the 2008 series, but turning Mr. Happy into a teenager was a terrible idea. It took away his only clear purpose as a cutesy reaction-face character, and turned him into the world’s blandest character that I had no idea what to do with. And for some reason, it will never occur to me for this entire series’ run to either have the potion wear off, or to have another potion change him back.
So in this episode, I decided to redesign Louis and Steve. Louis had been redrawn to not be literally traced from a Sonic dress up game from deviantART, and Steve now has arms and legs. The explanation? Apparently Steve had gotten them both plastic surgery for Christmas. I don’t know about you, but if someone tried to gift me plastic surgery for any occasion with no provocation, I’d beat their ass so hard that they’d need the surgery.
Anyway, after Mr. Chocolate shows up and asks to stay with the gang for a while, which upgraded him to a main character from this point forward, they get another knock at the door - this time from a Santa-like figure named Santy-Man, whose name I cribbed from another YouTube video at the time. Santy-Man’s sleigh has just broken down and he apparently wants this group of random civilians to help him out.
They first try sprinkling some magic dust on Mr. Chocolate and having him act as a reindeer. This works at first, but the magic quickly wears off and causes the sleigh to fall on some random person, crushing them in a surprisingly gory way by Fire’s standards. Back at home, they entertain the idea of buying a new sleigh, but those hopes are dashed when Louis informs them that it would cost a million dollars. If only Steve hadn’t blown all that money on plastic surgery…
Luckily for them, Mrs. Santy-Man shows up at the door and offers to take Santy-Man back to the North Pole to fix up the sleigh. How she was able to find them, and what transportation she had that Santy-Man didn’t was never explained. What’s more important is that the Fire gang is now able to enjoy a merry Christmas, including Mr. Happy who gets an Xbox, which is never brought up again because having him be a gamer would be too much of a character trait apparently.
Remember when Louis crashed the bus back in Theater Frenzy? Well now we’re spending an episode getting it fixed.
But first, Steve and Louis got redesigned again!! Louis has been redrawn once more and Steve no longer has arms and legs, reverting back to his old design. And this time, there’s no “plastic surgery” excuse to explain it. I guess I decided to retcon that part of the last episode. I really wish I took this opportunity to turn Mr. Happy back to a baby while I was at it, and pretend Growing Up never happened.
My memory’s pretty hazy on this one, but I’m pretty sure it started with Steve telling Louis to get off his ass and go get the bus fixed, and to take Mr. Happy with him so that the pointless bean has something to do. They take Ball Man’s car to the shop, and on the way Louis yells at Mr. Happy just for existing I guess. At the shop, they reveal that the Fire gang stole the bus from a driver who looked suspiciously like Santy-Man, but without the red suit. Despite the confession of a crime, the clerk agrees to help them and sends out a repairman, a frog named Uggie (pronounced like “ugly” without the L), who seems dim-witted but successfully gets the bus working again.
I remember hating this episode too, though not nearly as much as Growing Up.
This one started with Louis and Mr. Chocolate sitting on the couch watching TV, both of them noticeably fatter than usual. Steve comes in and suggests that they should hit the gym. Mr. Happy comes in to say his piece, and everyone unanimously tells him to shut up. I guess I was trying to make Mr. Happy the Meg Griffin of Fire, but not even that ended up sticking.
So the cat and chocolate nugget make their way over to their local gym, where they meet a female workout trainer with sort-of-Hatsune Miku hair. She immediately gets the hots for Louis, who is put off by her advances and wants nothing to do with her. And this is where the whole episode falls apart.
I remember pushing this episode into production as soon as I came up with it; the idea of Louis and Mr. Chocolate bumbling around at the gym somehow tickled my autism. But there was also another idea I was fixated on: you’d think that if an edgy teenager wanted to make “THE MOST AWESOMEST EPIC CARTOON CHARACTER EVER” like I clearly wanted to do with Louis, I would make him a gigachad who impregnates every living thing with two X chromosomes. But for some reason, I was so uncomfortable with Louis ever having a love interest that I ranted about it any chance I got, and even shut down fans who suggested it. If you happen to be one of those people, I’m so sorry. In fact, I’m sorry to anybody I interacted with while Louis was a thing; I was an even bigger douchebag back then than I am now.
What I’m saying is, because there was no pre-planning with most of these episodes and I never bothered to record any second takes, what was supposed to be an episode of Louis and Mr. Chocolate dicking around with gym equipment became a vehicle for my stupid “LOUIS MUST BE ABSTINENT” obsession. And that’s what the rest of the episode consisted of; it was just this gym lady chasing Louis around the gym while he avoided her. At one point he tries to trap him in a dark room and kiss him, but he pulls a switcheroo and she ends up kissing Mr. Chocolate, who seems far more into her than Louis.
The episode ended with the lady getting arrested for some reason, presumably the blatant sexual harassment, and the two cops were a flamboyant man with a pedo mustache and a ghost. This may sound really random (and it was), but this was actually a backdoor sneak-peek at an upcoming series I had planned at the time named Rusty: Senile Cop. It would have followed Rusty, the ghost, and his exploits in the police force. This series obviously never got off the ground, and this cameo would be his only appearance.
Another episode that tried to be a Mr. Happy episode, but took a hard left-turn and became another reason why “The Louis Show” would have been a better title for this series.
There wasn’t much to this one. Louis and Mr. Happy try playing football outside, but things go awry when the football ends up crashing through Ball-Man’s window. The rest of the episode is the gang trying to come up with ways to fix the window, none of which involved actually replacing it like a normal person.
I guess I remembered the scientist existed, because he shows up for a bit to test out his latest invention: a bazooka that shoots a Windows error message that covers the broken window, because apparently this is now an episode of Greeny Phatom.
God I sucked at episode names.
So Zack and Bob from the 2008 series return for this one! Have they become cats too like Louis? No. Do they even bring that up? No. Have they developed beyond Bob being a punching bag and Zack being a living prop? No…well okay, I don’t remember Louis beating up on Bob in this episode, but that’s more development on Louis’s part than on Bob’s. They’re still the same worthless characters that no one liked in the first series.
Basically, the three team up and cause shenanigans that Steve - the character who supposedly hates chaos and wants to stop it - sits there and does jack shit about. That’s the problem with any character that wasn’t a green cat - they stayed in the background and did absolutely nothing, just letting Louis run around and do whatever he wants, consequence-free. At one point the Ederson brothers launch fireworks, one of them flying into Ball-Man’s recently fixed window. I guess it was Ball-Man’s turn to be the butt monkey.
I actually remember this episode being controversial. At one point there’s a joke about the Edersons sounding like “a bunch of autistic 12-year-olds”, which was supposed to be a jab at my autistic 12-year-old self at the time I made those cartoons, but I never indicated that I was on the spectrum so it just came off as edgelord humor. Oops.
This one’s a very close second for the title of “Worst Fire episode”.
At this point I was holding myself to a strict schedule of one episode a month, and it was clearly fucking everything up. I wasn’t able to flesh out any ideas, revise bad scripts, or even recover fully from health issues. When I made this episode, I had recently come down with laryngitis, and the moment my voice even slightly returned, I went ahead and made this episode. And it was pretty obvious; every character sounded like they were about to hack up a lung.
Now if I really wanted to make an episode but was smart about it, I could have made an episode where everyone was sick. That would have at least explained why everyone sounded so sickly. But no, we instead focus on Louis seeing a commercial for “Goam”, which was a parody of “Floam”, which nobody had given a shit about for years at that point, buying a tin of “Goam”, and fucking around with it.
That’s it. That’s most of the episode.
I guess it ended with Steve finally chewing Louis out for being annoying, which he of course completely ignores, because he’s more interested in seeing what happens if he stuck the Goam to itself. This causes a little guy to come out of the tin, scream at Louis for “angering the Goam God”, and devour him. I guess it’s interesting that, for once in this series, something ended badly for Louis.
Here we are, the final released episode of this shitfest. This episode only existed to kick Mr. Happy out of the show, since I had no idea what to do with him, and every attempt at developing him got ruined by my insistence that Louis must be the undisputed main character.
It starts with Steve taking Mr. Happy to the casino, despite the fact that he’s physically two years old at most, and even under the effect of the potion he wasn’t of age to be gambling. Really begs the question of where the fuck the mother went, and why she didn’t take custody when this stupid poopsock has been spending this whole series being a bad father.
Anyway, Mr. Happy plays the slot machine and immediately wins the jackpot on his first try. Back at home, everyone wonders what he’s gonna do with his earnings when a commercial comes on the TV for the titular “College in the Sky”, which is exactly what it sounds like; a college in the sky being promoted a giant, coked-up blue bird named Greggy. Mr. Happy immediately decides that this is what he’s using his winnings for, wanting to fulfill his apparent lifelong dream of being a VCR repairman. The joke was that the job was as pointless in 2010 as he was. He acquires a whistle, blows it, and gets whisked away to the college by Greggy himself, presumably to never be seen or brought up again.
Here we go, the season 2 premiere I was so hyped to make, where I intended to fix the problem of too many pointless characters, by throwing in more pointless characters!
We begin with Louis and Steve, now rid of Mr. Happy, moving into a new apartment when they meet their new roommates, Ronald Duck and some alligator whose name I assume was Carl. They also meet their neighbor and token girl character Maria. None of them had a single identifiable personality trait between them, and I assume that if this season actually came into fruition they would have become props, just like every other character who wasn’t a green cat.
The group immediately goes on their first outing to the park, where there happens to be a fishing contest going on. They decide to rent a boat together and compete, where they find that their only opponents are … Zack and Bob. What was it with me and trying to make those two a thing? They were never going to be a thing. No one ever liked them. Anyway, they all fish and the main group actually loses to Louis’s worthless brothers. The gang decides “oh well” and goes home while Zack and Bob celebrate their victory, before their boat breaks from the weight of all their fish. And that’s the episode.
It had been a year or two later at this point. Louis and Mr. Chocolate had already run its very short course, and I had attempted to make this a standalone cartoon before realizing I was basically making the same shit as Fire all over again. So why not make it a Fire episode?
So Louis is on the phone with his new neighbor, Maria, the only character from the other Season 2 episode that didn’t get scrapped. They’re talking about the hot new video game Rock Hero 6, a riff on the popular Guitar Hero and Rock Band games at the time. Louis and Mr. Chocolate rush over to Maria’s place and they all get pretty good at the game. So good in fact, that they decide to form a real rock band named “Big Sexy Hair”.
They immediately join a Battle of the Bands, where they preform a song about how awesome they are over stock iMovie music, and get booed off the stage. Maybe if they hadn’t picked Mr. Chocolate as the singer with his prepubescent Kermit the Frog voice, it would have gone differently.
Not the best season 2 premiere or introduction to Maria, but better than that fishing episode. And at least I had the sense to introduce one new pointless character instead of three.
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