For this sci-fi blog, I decided to talk about “One of Us”, an episode of The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius. In this episode, a woman named Grandma Taters is turns every single one of Jimmy’s friends and family into mindless happy zombies by hypnotizing them, and it's up to Jimmy and Cindy to stop her.
The episode begins by one Jimmy’s best friends, Carl Wheezer, telling Jimmy that their friend Sheen is acting strange, but Jimmy doesn’t believe him. Sheen soon walks up to them smiling an eerie smile, and talking in a somewhat creepy tone. He says that it’s a happy day, and then he says that he watched a show called "The Happy Show Show " on channel 357 the previous night. He recommends that they watch it, and that would will make him "happy" if they did. Sheen then walks away in a zombie-like manner, leaving Jimmy somewhat suspicious, but not really bothered. Later that night, instead of watching the show, Jimmy fools around on his computer. Sheen calls his phone, and asks him if he’s watching the show. Jimmy says no, and Sheen argues that he should watch it "the next day... or the next day... or maybe the next day," and so on. By then, Jimmy felt a little bit creeped out, but still didn’t let it bother him.
The next day at the Candy Bar restaurant, Carl comes up to him with the same creepy smile as Sheen and asks if he watched "The Happy Show Show" last night. Jimmy doesn't answer as he sees Libby, classmate who loves music, turn off the nearby radio. She asks him the same question and Jimmy looks and sees Butch and Bolbi (other classmates of Jimmy who bicker and fight one another) being friendly to each other. Betty Quinlan walks up to him and also says that he should watch the show. Out of love (or, as Jimmy states, "scientific curiosity") he switches on the TV and goes to channel 357, only to find a old, innocent and sweet-looking woman named Grandma Taters. He watches only the first 10 seconds of the program, decides that it’s the worst show he’s ever seen, and turns the TV off.
The next day, he goes to school, which suddenly appears quiet and empty. He turns a corner, and all of his classmates are standing there, looking like creepy smiling zombies. They ask him what he thought of the show, and he goes on a rant about how terrible it was, stating that he could only watch the first 10 seconds of it. They implore him to watch it again, but he refuses. Betty Quinlan tells him to come over to her house later and watch it with her, and, because she’s his crush, he does so.
Once Jimmy gets to Betty’s house, he looks through her window and sees that the show is actually hypnotizing people, and hears that soon Grandma Taters will broadcast her show to the entire world. He tries to run back to warn his parents about it, but they have already been hypnotized. One by one, all of Jimmy’s friends are hypnotized by the show. He runs into Cindy Vortex, a friend who just got back from her karate convention. She is the only one who isn’t hypnotized, and together they run from the freaky, smiling, happy zombies. He informs her of what’s happened, and they rush to Taters’ house to stop the broadcast.
After confronting the woman, Jimmy's friends appear and capture him, tying him to a chair so that Taters can broadcast the show. Cindy enters, seemingly hypnotized but soon reveals that it's a distraction, and she fights the zombies and Taters. With Taters and the zombies occupied, Jimmy dresses as Grandma Taters and restores their minds by running the show himself. Jimmy tells Taters that she shouldn't mess with people's minds. She agrees that it was a bad idea. A spaceship suddenly lands and two copies of the old woman come out to greet her. She leaves with them, but not before ominously saying "We'll be back!"
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