pinky and the brain - s1e3b: that smarts
here it is. lol.
episode summary: frustrated at pinky’s constant disruption of his plans (okay, brain, if you say so) brain invents a machine to make him smarter. it goes about as well as you think it would.
the rundown:
it’s acme labs.
unless this is just some cage in the middle of nowhere, i guess. i don’t know.
no, wait. definitely acme labs. brain is writing in his Mouse Diary, probably relating the weird dream he just had about being in post-war japan. he has a lot of those, it seems, probably because it’s a good way for the writers to keep the status quo.
mumble mumble grump grump mumble mumble
“ah!” like he’s just discovered something. you’re not getting anywhere with those formulae though, brain. ∞A2-A= 2 to the tetration is just absolute gibberish and it’s not going to help you at all.
still, i’m glad he’s found what he’s looking for. satisfied with his nonsense calculations, brain calls pinky over.
bomp.
“narf.”
“what were you doing up there, pinky.”
“oh!” says pinky, who has just remembered he’s british. “i was having a devil of a time cleaning the chimney, brain.”
“we don’t have a chimey.”
“oh, well. there you are then.”
yeah.
brain reassures pinky that he is nowhere near the ceiling, which is good, because we don’t want more asthma than this poor guy already has. instead, he proposes to pinky that he’s figured out why they haven’t taken over the world yet.
“oh, i know why, brain. it’s gremlins.”
LITTLE SPRINKLY SPRITES THAT CONFUSE US
ALWAYS TWIDDLING THEIR LITTLE FINGERS IN OUR EARS
“an interesting theory.”
i like how brain draws himself, here. with the little ¬¬ face. grompy.
“but i have reviewed our past efforts, pinky, turning the situations into numbers in an effort to locate the exact problem.”
“well that sounds, um. narf.”
“yes, i’m sure it does.”
luckily, he’s plotted them all out on his little graph plotter, which is apparently going to paint a picture of the thing that’s ruining their plans... because... that’s how numbers work.... apparently? coming from the guy who thinks you can multiply infinity by -2 tetrated, forgive me for being skeptical.
let’s see how this goes!
oh.
still, pinky looks like he wants to put it on the fridge, so it’s not all bad, i guess. “egad, brain! that looks like me! but flat!”
“it is you, pinky. my calcuations have indicated that you are the problem.”
ouch.
“p... pinky?”
the leering figure of brain in his Man Suit behind him doesn’t help the tone, and should also probably serve as a reminder that sometimes it’s-- well, we’ll get to that.
poor pinky. ):
brain rubs it in further by deriding pinky as a “spazzy, beetleheaded dufus.” he has.... diagrams, to match. this is all very rude and unneeded.
😭😭😭😭😭
“but you’re not getting rid of me, are you, brain? i mean you? working as a single? look at what happened to jerry lewis when he split from dean! all that stuff in your hair--”
<gay little hand flip>
“point taken.”
“but fear not.” <gay little hand flip in response.>
but brain has another plan! he is going to make pinky smart. so that’s not too bad, i guess? oh he’s making me change everything about myself! but at least he didn’t dump me.
hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
i’m waiting for the christmas episode.
so brain gets pinky all strapped into the promare spinny machine.
he also makes this face when pinky asks why people don’t usually just make themselves smarter. so okay. he maintains that “the problem is in the execution”, but quite frankly i think it’s because most people aren’t into eugenics.
anyway brain activates the smartsotron.
it, uh. i don’t know why this shot was taken from this angle. i’m sorry. i’m sure, historically, it made a lot of people happy.
brain does some more scientific mumbling.
“fourty seven knots, six-- nineteen kelvin, fibbonaci, n minus one,”
“coming-- coming--”
in the nicest way possible, brain, i’m not sure he is.
“now!”
if you say so, brain. he goes off to pull the lever that. does that.
it has an effect.
the face of a man who is enjoying himself, apparently.
brain also shorts out the whole electricity for acme labs, which is very funny.
“pinky?” says brain, like he was concerned for his health like five minutes ago, when he put him into the bloody thing in the first place.
“oh, that was fun, brain! haha ha. narf. hoo! i’m all tingly! woo woo.”
“fun, perhaps, but obviously not successful.”
“oh, no, no, i think it was!”
“at first i thought the folded dipole wasn’t working as your centrefed, horizontally mounted conductor,”
“but frequencies below thirty megahertz--!”
“loud and clear! haha!”
“and i must say, brain, the peak value wave shape of the impulse voltage? glorious! i mean, hitting that maximum value without appreciable, superimposed oscillations! egad brain! brilliant!”
haha ha.
“YES!”
good for brain. the worrying implications of his assumption that making pinky smart would cure his tourettes??? we can worry about that later.
narf.
anyway, so tonight’s plan for world domination is that brain will pose as jimmy hoffa--
okay.
anyway, he intends to pose as jimmy hoffa and manipulate the old labour leaders into worshipping him.
with that, they will help him utilise the industrial complex to build a “forced vertoconvector”, whatever that means.
“it will create millions of steaming, tiny guysers that will actually lift people several inches off the ground, immobilising them.”
“egad, brain! it’s like giant air hockey!”
unfortunately for brain, his coefficient values are wrong. “it’s suppose to be sin, not cosin. kind of flips the whole thing around. haha. won’t work.”
inside his head, brain screams, quietly.
but never mind! initially, he’s excited, because pinky has saved them a whole night’s work! tremendous!
and luckily, he has a backup plan, which is also totally going to work. “take a look at this one,”
“colleague.”
“oh, brain.”
this is how mice flirt, i guess.
ignoring that “colleague” is a slight downgrade from “lifelong friend,” brain explains that he intends to program a computer to generate a fantastically popular romance novel, that i actually don’t want to look at the cover of for too long.
ew.
let’s move away from that. the romance novel “will contain a hypnophonetic sentence so long and so confusing that the reader will be forced to reread it, endlessly, out loud, and the frequencies of those sounds will hypnotise all those around them, primed for my suggestion that,”
I RULE THE WORLD. it’s not quite a close up but it’s a funny face so i’m counting it.
pinky is not as hype.
“the frequency needs to be an exact integral multiple of the input, doesn’t it? or it’ll be all wobble wobble bluueeroooogh.”
that’s one way of putting it. “not hypnotic at all, nope. won’t work.”
“yes. you’re right.”
brain is not enjoying this any more, it seems.
“by converting our cage into a nuclear reactor, we can produce enough energy--”
“but your migration area is tiny, brain! the neutron will never be able to slow down from fission to thermal in here!”
“please, pinky. let me finish--”
“but it’s got to be at least one sixth of the square distance between--”
“pinky!”
lms if you are the square distance between pinky.
“it seems to be, brain, that it’s not my fault at all that these plans haven’t worked.”
man. we don’t get to see pinky mad at brain very often? i love it. please let him get this mad in the reboot. madder, even. let them argue, wb!!
i don’t think brain has much grounds to argue, considering that he is, of course, the inventor of Really Big Magnet That Sticks People To The Floor By Their Pocket Change. still, he gives it a go.
he drags pinky back over to his weird little graph machine, citing that he “calcuated it himself” and “the numbers don’t lie.”
<gay little hand flip>. that’s not entirely fair because this is a tween but. it’s funny.
“actually, there seems to be a little booboo right here.”
poke.
he sets about correcting it, of course!
brain may well be at his limit.
(they angle that through the bunsen burner as it boils over, which is a very nice touch. it’s a metaphor, kids! he’s having a Hard Time.)
“these-- this!--”
“it’s preposterous what you’re saying! it’s ridiculous! it’s absurd!”
“but brain--”
“just go!”
“naaaaaarf.” going mouse! leave. ):
but now that brain has vented his own raging insecurities, he has some calculating to do.
well! isn’t that a merry little plot twist.
brain’s response to this is to have a nervous breakdown, because of course it is.
“no!” he cries. “he’s even smarter than i! smarter!”
“but i have accepted my own errors. the team needs balance. balance! yes.”
this can’t be good.
conclusion:
meanwhile, pinky is mourning their friendship! and all of the bops on the head.
“being a smarty is no fun! brain doesn’t like me.”
awww. ):
hm.
meanwhile, brain is wittering on about how “sacrifices must be made,” as he plugs himself into the machine.
“fourty seven knots, six-- nineteen kelvin, fibbonaci, n plus one, coming.” despite that, he doesn’t seem very happy to be here.
bonk.
brain runs back to their cage excitedly, to show pinky what he’s done!
and immediately falls over in the process. aww.
“pinky! look! i’m a ninny! a wooden headed dumbdumb!”
“there’s not a smart thought in my whole empty head!”
this man is having a nervous breakdown.
“narf, i say! narf to the world!”
wait, what’s that noise?
ah.
“ah! it’s good to be back. brain? brain?”
bonk.
that doorway is evidently a real problem for them. someone should probably fix it before they break their little ankles. ):
“i fixed it! i’m a nitwit!” pinky cheers. “hurrah!”
“yes. i fixed it as well, pinky. i’m as dense as a tree stump.”
“you mean--”
“yes.”
“well, we’ll just have to make you smart again, don’t we?”
“we can’t. we’re both too stupid to operate the machine.”
so instead they just sort of sit down and give up, i guess.
“what do you wanna do tonight, brain?”
“the same thing we do every night, pinky.”
“what’s that?”
“i have no idea.” says brain, in a monotone, clearly upset deadpan. “narf.”
so that’s that, i guess.
originally, i was going to give this to brain - they were both as smart as each other, and if they had worked together they probably could have taken over the world. all he had to do was take the L and let pinky advise him.
on the other hand.... pinky is emotionally intelligent enough that i think he could have had a shot at reasoning with brain about it. and if he’d tried, then he would have figured out that brain had put himself in the machine, and if brain had tried to reason through his insecurities, he would have worked out that pinky had put himself in the machine, and--
basically they get half a point again.
brain: 6 pinky: 7 outside influence: 11
because i think that’s fair.
either way, they seem to have fixed it, somehow, by the next segment. so it’s all good.
BRAINSTEM BRAINSTEM.