- "Eat your veggies!"
Airdate: February 4, 2000
"Havin' a Ball" is the fifth episode of the first (internet) season of Happy Tree Friends.
Pop the father bear is playing catch with his son, Cub. It goes fine until the ball bounces off the bear cub's head instead of him catching it. The ball is then revealed to have ended up on the other side of a very busy road. Not wanting to make his son unhappy, Pop risks his life to get through all those vehicles and reach the ball. Despite his injuries, he manages to get the ball, but he ends up walking off a cliff and falls into a helicopter carrying an injured Lumpy. After his remains land at the cliff's base, his son is seen climbing down with a rope. The bear cub succeeds in getting the ball back, only to be crushed by the gurney holding Lumpy. Lumpy suddenly panics and tries to move away from the spot, but he ends up being crushed by the fallen helicopter. Cub's hat is seen landing on the blood-covered ball.
"Havin' a Ball" contains the following:
- Ambidextrous Sprite: Applied to Cub's safety pin.
- Cruel and Unusual Death:
- Pop's body is cut up by helicopter blades.
- Cub is crushed by a gurney.
- Lumpy is crushed by a helicopter.
- Debut Queue: Pop and Cub's debut.
- Downer Ending: Pop gets the ball, but dies in the process along with Lumpy and Cub.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: This episode reverses the Pop & Cub dynamic. While any episode starring them usually has Pop accidentally injuring Cub throughout the story, here Pop goes out of his way to make his son happy by enduring some painful slapstick while Cub himself suffers little to no injures (though they both die).
- "Everybody Dies" Ending: The first episode to have no survivors.
- Failed a Spot Check: Pop somehow fails to notice that he's at the edge of the cliff and walks off it, even though he looks in the direction of the edge when he grabs the ball.
- Foreshadowing: When Pop first walks into traffic to get Cub's ball, a rescue helicopter can be seen flying by in the background. This helicopter ends up being the cause of both his, Cub's, and Lumpy's deaths.
- Helicopter Blender: Pop's death.
- Just Plane Wrong: The helicopter depicted in this episode is way smaller than Real Life rescue helicopters.
- Meaningful Name: "Having a ball" means to have fun. This suits the pleasant beginning of the episode. The "ball" part is also related to the item being central to the plot.
- No One Should Survive That!: Among Pop's injuries, one of them has his head run over by one of the trucks, as shown by the skid mark on his face. Being run over at all, much less on the head by a heavy vehicle, should be fatal.
- Noodle Incident: Lumpy is already in a rescue helicopter at the start of the episode for an injury that is never explained.
- Oh, Crap!: Pop has this reaction twice: Once when Cub's ball bounces onto the other side of a busy highway and later on when he walks off a cliff and sees that he's falling towards a helicopter.
- Rouge Angles of Satin: The "Classics Remastered" version of the episode accidentally spells the show title's "Friends" wrong, turning it into "Firends".
- Shout-Out: Pop's death is similar to Thomas Murphy's death in Alien³.
- Squashed Flat: Cub by Lumpy's gurney, Lumpy himself by the fallen helicopter.
- This Is Gonna Suck: Pop has this reaction before going through traffic.
- Too Dumb to Live: Pop goes through heavy traffic to retrieve Cub's ball and when he does get it, he accidentally walks off a nearby cliff, resulting in him being diced up by a helicopter.
- Updated Re-release: One of the early episodes to be part of the "Classics Remastered" releases, which rerelease early HTF episodes in HD.
- Your Size May Vary: Cub is almost as tall as Pop in the first scene. The former's remains also become as big as the latter's remains near the end of the episode.
