Tina faces a conflict between her hall monitor duty and having fun when she falls in with a new, underground school trend. Back at the restaurant, Bob and Linda try helping Teddy sneak food into a movie.
Tropes-Loose:
- Bare-Handed Puppetry: Gene and Louise start a hand-prancing revue in the school basement, where Gene and other kids put clothes on their hands and finger-walk on a stage. Tina is supposed to report it to Frond, but she becomes enthralled by the show and starts performing as Holly Monitors (since she is the Hall Monitor).
- Beneath Suspicion: Who would've expected that the one to sell out the hand-prancing revue was the main hand-prancer himself? Gene goes so beneath suspicion that the only hint is his confession at the end.
- Call-Back: Linda breaks out her armpit hairnets to try and assist Teddy with his food sneaking, and even references her previous use of them.
- The Cameo: Darryl, Doug Wheeler, and the Papasian family, who otherwise haven't appeared since Season 9, make a brief cameo in the assembly.
- Cassandra Truth: Nobody believes Tina when she tries to claim innocence in Frond's shutdown the hand-prancing revue.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: Hand-prancing is presented as a kid-friendly version of performing in drag, with Tina's obsession with it and feeling free while performing having all the trappings of a Coming-Out Story. Playing up the similarities further is that Gene (who has a history of crossdressing in previous episodes) is the main performer at the hand-prancing revue, and that his hand-prancing persona (Mavis Middlefinger) is female.
- Everyone Has Standards: Louise is willing to entertain all the other kids' ideas for the hand-prancing, but is very disturbed by Millie's idea (Fing-lise Belcher, basically just a hand-version of Louise) and point-blank tells her that she doesn't like it.
- Femme Fatale: Essential for an affectionate parody of noir cinema. Mavis Middlefinger, Gene’s manual alter ego, plays the trope straight. She’s alluring, beautiful, mysterious, and dangerous but still sympathetic.
- Flipping the Bird: When Mr. Frond breaks up the hand-prancing show, he says "Here's a finger for you" and points to the door with his thumb. Millie argues with him that a thumb is not a finger, and then says "This is a finger!", her hand covered up by Louise's head. Mr. Frond reacts with understandable horror.
- Four-Fingered Hands: The hand-prancing figures have a thumb and pinky for arms, two fingers between for legs, and nothing else.
- How We Got Here: The episode begins at the assembly from the end of the episode, which Tina disrupts by projecting her hand prancing instead of the intro video Frond prepared. She then recounts the events that led to this moment.
- Insane Troll Logic: Linda somehow thinks the armpits are the cleanest part of the body. While Bob is usually just resigned and annoyed at all the crazy ideas the rest of his family come up with, even he can't help but to crack a smile at how crazy that sounds to him.
- Jerkass: Mr. Frond notices something's obviously going on at Wagstaff and wants it shut down. Not because anyone is actually doing anything wrong, but because kids seem more relaxed and are mingling outside their social circles. Even when Tina finds out it's because of the hand-prancing revue, she still has to hide it from Frond even though nobody's breaking any rules. It says a lot that at the end, the school superintendent actually liked the show Tina and the kids put on and told Frond it was the most creative and original thing he's supposedly ever done. Of course, he steals the credit for it.
- Literal Metaphor: When Tina knocks into Linda with a broom, Linda says Tina is literally sweeping her off her feet.
- Nausea Fuel: In-universe, everyone reacts to Linda's armpit bag idea by telling her it's really gross. She feels otherwise.
- Noir Episode: Tina's plotline is an Affectionate Parody of one.
- No Ending: For the B-plot. Bob and Linda's competitiveness on how to solve Teddy's sneaking dinner into the movie theater dilemma scares him away and we never hear what he ended up doing. Somewhat subverted in that Bob and Linda try out their ideas at the presentation and Linda's idea works better, although everyone still thinks it's gross, including Mr. Frond when she offers him some french fries from her other armpit hairnet.
- Noodle Incident: When Teddy comes into the restaurant saying he has a big problem, Bob says if it's that his underwear are too tight and he can't get them off, Bob isn't helping him again.
- Pimp Duds: Louise, who runs the underground hand-prancing revue, wears a large top hat (over her bunny ears, of course) that she also stores her money in.
- Pop-Culture Pun Episode Title: The title is a play on Footloose.
- Private Eye Monologue: Tina narrates her story like a movie detective, complete with sax accompaniment.
- Punny Name: Most of the hand-prancing names, like Tom Shoes, Skatie Holmes, or Holly Monitors.
- Pyrrhic Victory: Linda's idea for smuggling a burger technically works better than Bob's, but only on account of Bob's ingredients being placed out-of-order—pretty much everyone else agrees that Linda's idea is absolutely disgusting and pretty much unusable.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: Tina acts as one while serving as hall monitor, giving Zeke a spare stick of gum to replace the one he had to surrender to Tina so long as he saves it for the end of class.
- Renamed the Same: Regular-Sized Rudy's hand-prancing name is Regular-Sized Randolph. To play up the similarities, Rudy-as-Randolph also goes by the nickname Randy (similar to Rudy), while Rudy's real name is Rudolph (similar to Randolph).
- The Reveal: The person who betrays Mavis Middlefinger's show to Mr. Frond is none other than Mavis herself. Gene sold out the hand-prancing revue to Mr. Frond, not Tina, because he wanted to have his normal lunch routine back.
- Slave to PR: After Tina and some of the other hand-prancers hijack the school open house presentation with a handy-prancing performance, Frond doesn't punish any of them for it because the school superintendent loved it.Linda: So, what, is she suspended or something? I thought it was cute.
Frond: Well, lucky for Tina, so did the superintendent. - Snacksploitation: The B-plot is Bob and Linda trying to help Teddy sneak a burger at the movies. Linda suggests using her armpit hairnets, which everyone else agrees is gross; while Bob comes up with a way of hiding each ingredient separately in plastic bags held up by tape under a vest to assemble inside, but he keeps getting them out of order and the bags keep falling off.
- Shout-Out:
- The Store Next Door is Billy’s Eyelash Accessories.
- The Burger of the Day when Bob & Linda are showing Teddy how to hide a hamburger is a Step Up 2: The Beets Burger.
- Bob's method of smuggling a burger into a movie theatre is a slightly less comedic but more impractical version of Mr. Bean doing a similar thing with sandwich ingredients on a park bench.
- Stealing the Credit: Frond tells the superintendent that hand-prancing was his idea because she liked it.
- Two Aliases, One Character: Courtney is the only character seen with two hand-prancing personas—Tom Shoes and Skatie Holmes, using them both at once as a sort of double act.
- Vulgar Humor: Tina can be seen wiping graffiti off a locker. While only the first three letters remain by the time we see what she's erasing, the original word was quite clearly "penis".
- Yellow Sash of Power: Tina's job as hall monitor is the focus of the episode. She is shown to be strict but fair to the students (confiscating Zeke's gum, but giving him another piece for after class, for example), which is why she is appointed by Mr. Frond to find out whatever is distracting the students lately. When she discovers the secret hand prancing show in the basement, she is torn between telling Frond and participating in it.
