Bucky O'Hare - 12

"Bye Bye Berserker Baboon"
Toadborg has a plan to help the toads circumvent their instinctive fear of berserker baboons so they can conquer Bruce and Bruiser's home world Betelgeusia. However, as the (somewhat competent for a change) Air Marshal points out, those fearsome baboons are still a most formidable foe even without tripping the toads' instinctive fears; and for this insight, Komplex and Toadborg assign him the exceedingly undesirable mission of capturing and transporting a rather monstrous creature to Betelgeusia to be their backup plan. As they and Bucky O'Hare and his crew—especially Willy DuWitt (and, by extension, the audience) in particular—will learn, however, just avoiding and minimizing one's problems doesn't make them go away.

Points of interest:
0:26 While the use of "misanthropes" here is proper to the context, the context itself is rather unusual. A misanthrope is one who hates all people in general; while the anthropomorphic animals of the Aniverse certainly count as people, and therefore somebody who hated all of them would certainly counted as a misanthrope, we've seen elsewhere throughout this series that those Betelgeusian berserker baboons don't harbor any general hatred toward anyone but the toads (and only the toads loyal to Komplex at that; Bruiser didn't bear any grudge against the three exiled toads who made Komplex when he met them back in the sixth episode). Nevertheless, Komplex is still using the term properly in context, because from its exceedingly biased (and racially prejudiced) point of view, only the toads (and itself, since it is both their creation and their ruler) actually count as "people" whereas all the other anthropomorphic species do not. (Also, those three exiled toads who built it in the first place? They don't count either, as exiling them was part of its process of making unpersons of them.)
0:59 While it's true Frix can't see the Air Marshal as you say, Toadborg, that obviously doesn't mean he doesn't know you and he are there.
1:29 Considering Frax was demonstrated to be slightly more sensible than Frix in the previous episode, one could make the case that Toadborg was practicing a kind of poetic justice by putting Frax in with the goggle test group while leaving Frix in the control group for this experiment.
2:18 Here, we see one of the rare flashes of competence which go some way toward explaining how the Air Marshal rose to his rank in the first place.
2:26 Toadborg and Komplex's response to this entirely sensible complaint also go some way toward explaining why they don't have anyone more competent than their current Air Marshal in his position; those competent enough to bring up too many of these reasonable objections to their bosses' elaborate schemes probably ended up being given all the worst assignments (such as this one) as punishment.
3:08 Willy DuWitt's classmate T.J. is a gorgeous gal with expensive designer clothes and a fashionable held-over-from-the-late-eighties hairdo, so (of course) she's rich, spoiled, vain—and *EVIL*!
4:36 Considering how unpleasant a place to live the baboons would probably consider a swamp planet like Bog to be, if the toads weren't at war with them, the baboons would probably be more than willing to let them have the place too. (It would be rather like if some tundra-dwelling extraterrestrials dropped by our solar system and asked us if they could have Mars; we probably could work out a deal with them.)
4:54 Betelgeusia is also—not at all coincidentally—something like the Wookies' home world of Kashyyyk or the jungle moon Yavin IV where one of the Rebel Alliance's secret bases was in Star Wars.
5:01 As with the Wampa on Hoth in Star Wars, something one wonders is what predatory creatures on icy worlds (like Cahill) can find to eat when they don't have outsiders bringing them any fresh meat. (Of course, maybe unlike Hoth, Cahill has several different climates and seasons, and the Air Marshal and his friends just happen to be visiting this part during the planet's equivalent of Winter.)
6:04 Bruiser's commander there in the foreground seems to be getting a good long look at that full-figured baboon gal's ample cleavage; and she doesn't seem to mind the attention. (Maybe that's his girlfriend?)
7:31 That's pretty obviously Bruiser's voice actor dubbed over Willy DuWitt. Had I been tasked with recording this, I would have just made Willy DuWitt's voice actor do his best imitation and then modified the recording a little in post-production as necessary to make it sound convincingly full-bodied and intimidating.
7:52 For that matter, that toad squadron leader sounds like he could do one of those yells. (Also, it's curious that none of these toad troopers immediately recognize those as baboon voices; evidently their self-preserving instinct recognizes only the baboons' appearances, not how they sound.)
8:14 Notably, the goggles aren't distorting Willy's appearance. Sure, Toadborg (who probably programmed them) now knows not to fear the kid and that he's not the same species, but would the other toads know that if he happened to be wearing his masked helmet?
8:26 Why, you may ask, would the toads use gas to capture the baboons rather than live ammunition to exterminate them? Aside from this being a cartoon for children in which nobody is actually allowed to kill anybody else, the toads have already demonstrated an almost endless appetite for enslaving other species and employing their labor for the greater glory of their Toad Empire; and, of course, they would consider enslaving their most fearsome foes of all to be their greatest victory in the entire war.
8:56 Well, that's not much incentive for the toads to fight fair, then... is it, Willy?
11:21 If the toads only have to capture "hundreds" of the baboons to seize control of the planet, that probably explains why the baboons haven't sent out their own troops in force to attack the Toad Empire: there just aren't that many of them! Also, the baboons' population being that small probably explains why their civilization looks so low-tech: if we billions of humans with our expensive space programs haven't even managed to leave our own solar system, it's a fair bet a people whose entire planet's population could barely fill one of our small towns didn't even develop most of their own technology. They were probably still living in their Stone Age when some space-faring people (Jenny's people from Aldebaran, perhaps?) found them and decided to share their technology with them.
11:52 That's what you get for being competent and actually doing your job right for once, Air Marshal.
12:49 This is why, even if you're a big hulking bodybuilder who can chew up and spit out common street criminals without working up a sweat, you should still keep and bear arms. Governments—foreign and domestic—are a bigger threat to your life and liberty than any low-level criminals, and you need weapons to be able to defend yourself and the people around you from them.
13:49 While he's clearly not too bright (and doesn't use any language the universal translators can make comprehensible to any other species), his being able to wear clothing and wield weapons proves his species has at least *some* intelligence. (I'm thinking the toads manufactured his clothes and weapons and equipped him with them, as there's no way a species of monsters that usually prefer to live alone could be civilized enough to have manufactured such products. As to how they were able to get close enough to clothe and arm him? Well, this episode demonstrates they can manufacture gasses that selectively weaken and subdue other species, so they doubtless have some such they can use on this one as well.)
14:50 They probably should have figured this out sooner, but Toadborg did have the sense to equip the troops entirely with ranged weapons and keep them in the dark about exactly which species' planet they were conquering.
15:00 Toadborg did not have the sense, however, to make sure the troops' regular weapons were confiscated and locked away in their arsenals for the duration of the invasion.
15:49 Back in 1991, "polarized" was a favorite bit of techno-babble in a lot of science fiction stories for younger audiences, particularly when describing technology that produced an effect that could be reversed or negated (so that the writers could have the characters subsequently counter the effect by "reversing polarity" on it); but if this story were remade today (or just better written originally), Willy DuWitt really ought to be saying the goggles are "programmed" to make the baboons look wimpy (since as mentioned earlier, the goggles didn't affect the toads' perception of his own appearance), and that he'll hack this pair's program to render it inoperable and then broadcast a signal containing a "patch" based on his hack to "update" the other goggles' copies of the program with his malware.
16:10 For once, Dead-Eye is not particularly cocky about his team's chances.
16:44 As mentioned back in the fifth episode, Bucky O'Hare's home world is Warren, and a warren is a collective living area rabbits dig underground for themselves and their extended family. Since hares don't typically burrow into the ground the way rabbits do, these anthropomorphic hares must have at least a bit of rabbit ancestry in their blood, and Bucky's burrowing into the ground here confirms this.
17:45 When we get a closer look at it here, there's no obvious generator for the toads' tractor beam; it must be somewhere under the hangar's floor plates.
17:52 Fortunately for you, Jenny, this monster fancies carrying you around like some kind of personal pet the same way King Kong likes to carry a human woman around with him in his movies.
18:37 Good question, Air Marshal, and the answer is: order your troops to bring some of those gas canisters they used to subdue it earlier up to the hangar deck, and pronto!
18:57 This is the one and only time we see the S.S. Righteous Indignation using its intake vents.
19:11 Bucky O'Hare does his finest impression of Star Trek's Kirk and/or Picard to deliver the episode's moral lesson.
19:37 Willy DuWitt is getting to be quite the ladies' man.