- "Don't bite the hand that feeds you!"
Airdate: December 15, 2005
"From A to Zoo" is the two-part final episode of the second (internet) season of Happy Tree Friends.
Lumpy struggles to keep track of the rascally tree friends when they intentionally run away from him at the zoo. Cuddles and Toothy tease a baboon before running away. Sniffles asks Lumpy to take a picture of him with said baboon, only for things to go horribly wrong as the anteater gets attacked. While breaking a glass case to get a tranquilizer dart to stop the baboon, Lumpy ends up accidentally injuring Petunia with the broken glass shards. Worse, the first tranquilizer shot ends up hitting her instead, causing her to fall into a snake exhibit, while the second one jabs Lumpy's throat, causing him to pass out. At that point, it is too late to save Petunia. Meanwhile, Cuddles and Toothy tease yet another animal, a rhino. After burning the rhino with a branding iron, Cuddles promptly ditches Toothy before Lumpy can catch him. However, Toothy requests to see the rhino, so Lumpy obliges. He suddenly hears a scream. One head turn later, and Toothy's head gets impaled on the rhino's horn without Lumpy realizing. Lumpy finds a scared Flaky surrounded by chicks. He makes things worse by accidentally stepping on one, causing Flaky to become even more hysterical. They eventually end up covered in chick blood after Lumpy accidentally slips and crushes more chicks while trying to take Flaky away from the area. As for Cuddles, after playing with some helium, he encounters the baboon again, now free from its cage. When Cuddles tries to run away, he ends up jabbing his eye on the helium tank's nozzle, inflating his other eye like a balloon. Lumpy tries to calm down Flaky with a balloon, but she ends up fainting when she notices that said balloon is Cuddles's inflated eye, with the rabbit himself still attached. In the end, every student but Flaky (who is now clearly traumatized) is dead, with the baboon taking Sniffles's place. As the bus leaves the zoo, a camera flash occurs, followed by the baboon's screech and a bus crash.
"From A to Zoo" provides examples of:
- Absurd Phobia: Flaky screams horrifically... over cute little chicks that do absolutely no harm to her.
- Adults Are Useless: Lumpy just fails to keep his own students in order. Probably the only one Lumpy manages to save from their own shenanigans is Flaky, though she is traumatized as hell. Even when manages to catch up with one of the other students, his usual stupidity ends up costing their lives.
- An Aesop: The moral message goes well with this episode's theme of not acting against someone that one depends on (in this case, the students against Lumpy).
- Ambidextrous Sprite: Lumpy's antlers, as usual.
- Ambiguous Ending: The bus crashes right when the iris closes out, leaving the fates of Lumpy, Flaky, and the wild baboon unknown.
- Berserk Button: Never take a flashing photo near the baboon, or there will be hell to pay. Sniffles finds this out the hard way.
- Brick Joke: Lumpy makes a balloon animal in an attempt to calm down Flaky. It does not work due to said balloon being Cuddles's inflated eye from before.
- Bullying a Dragon: Cuddles and Toothy carelessly taunt the animals by poking them without caring about what they're capable of.
- Butt-Monkey: Lumpy spends his entire day trying to stop the tree friends from making a mess.
- Can Only Move the Eyes: Petunia ends up paralysed by a tranquilizer dart and falls into the snake enclosure. As the hungry snake approaches her, her eyes and only her eyes move to look at it.
- Cruel and Unusual Death:
- Sniffles is ripped apart by a baboon after pressing its Berserk Button.
- Cuddles's head fills up with helium, inflating his brain, or possibly killing him from helium poisoning.
- The snake that ate Petunia is torn apart when Lumpy uses his pen to free himself.
- Diegetic Soundtrack Usage: The students (except Flaky) sing the show's theme as they walk into the zoo together.
- Dinner Deformation: The snake after eating Petunia. Lumpy's shape also joins in after he gets eaten too.
- Eaten Alive: Petunia is swallowed and digested by the snake.
- Epic Fail: Lumpy fires his first tranquilizer dart at the baboon... only to hit Petunia, who is not in its way. The second one? He accidentally swallows it.
- Everyone Has Standards: Lumpy and Flaky's unintentional massacre of the baby chicks leaves them both extremely shell-shocked.
- Eye Scream:
- Cuddles slams his eye into the nozzle of the helium tank, killing him and inflating it into a balloon.
- Petunia's face is hit with broken glass and a dart.
- Faint in Shock: Flaky after seeing Cuddles's body, which the "balloon" came from.
- From Bad to Worse: Flaky is found panicking over chicks. Then Lumpy accidentally steps on one... then both are bathed in chick blood after accidentally falling on a large group of them...
- Helium Speech: Cuddles plays with a helium tank and sings with the resulting high-pitched voice. His scream during his death is even pitched up when he ends up jabbing his eye on the same tank's nozzle.
- Hilarity in Zoos: The gang's trip to the zoo goes horribly wrong.
- Ironic Juxtaposition: The photo taken of Sniffles and the baboon depicts the former as looking fine and the latter just starting to freak out. As Lumpy's hand pulls away, it shows the violent result.
- Karmic Death: Cuddles harasses the baboon, along with several of the animals. Later on, the baboon escapes and glares at him threateningly. When Cuddles attempts to flee, he gets the nozzle of a helium tank stuck in his eye, which inflates the other eye and kills him.
- Kill It Through Its Stomach: Lumpy tears apart the snake using his pen after getting Swallowed Whole.
- Last-Second Photo Failure: Sniffles is asked to move closer to the baboon by Lumpy, to the point where he was right on the edge of the cage. Once it flashes, the baboon is shown with red eyes and grabbing onto the bars. It was at this point that it starts attacking Sniffles.
- Maniac Monkeys: The baboon counts as this when you push his Berserk Button.
- Menagerie of Misery: Exaggerated when the cast goes to a zoo. The zoo is bad both for the animals, who have tiny, cramped environments and lax safety and protection, and the guests, with all the animals being fiercely violent and homicidal (resulting in the majority of the episode's deaths) and no security, employees, or first aid being available at any point.
- New Job as the Plot Demands: Lumpy is both the bus driver (like in "Happy Trails") and the teacher in this episode.
- Offscreen Crash: After the Iris Out, the sound of a bus crash is heard.
- Paper-Thin Disguise: The baboon who killed Sniffles earlier in the episode takes his place on the school bus at the end. When Lumpy starts getting suspicious, the baboon quickly dons Sniffles' glasses. Lumpy just shrugs and goes on with his work.
- Pun-Based Title: "From A to Z".
- Rhino Rampage: Cuddles angers a rhino by mischievously poking it with a branding iron. Toothy then asks Lumpy to lift him so he can watch the rhino through a hole. When Lumpy isn't paying attention, the rhino charges at Toothy and impales his head with its horn through the hole.
- Rule of Three: Cuddles pokes the rhino first with a normal stick, then with a pointed one, then with a branding iron.
- Snakes Are Sinister: A snake eats Petunia alive.
- Swallowed Whole: Petunia and later Lumpy end up eaten by a snake. By the time the latter arrives, however, the former has already been digested.
- They Killed Kenny Again: Sniffles, Petunia, Toothy, and Cuddles die.
- Too Dumb to Live: While it may seem like Lumpy is to blame for all the chaos, the tree friends' deaths are at no fault but their own (minus Petunia), since they continuously make poor choices (i.e. taking flashing photos of very photo-sensitive animals, misusing zoo equipment, and physically harming animals) and Lumpy tries and fails to prevent them from doing do.
- Tranquillizer Dart: Lumpy tries to use one to subdue the baboon attacking Sniffles, but accidentally hits Petunia instead, instantly paralysing her. At his second attempt, he accidentally inhales the dart, which knocks him out in seconds despite him being much bigger than Petunia.
