The seventeenth episode of the first season of Hey Arnold!.
False Alarm
When the fire alarm is pulled, Eugene is the prime suspect and is put on trial. Most of the student jury believes that Eugene is guilty, but Arnold is the only one who believes that Eugene may have been framed.
World Records
Arnold and his friends attempt to break a world record so they can be in a book of world records.
"False Alarm" provides examples of:
- Disproportionate Retribution: Eugene once borrowed Curly's favorite pencil and returned it with chew marks all over it and sharpened down to just the eraser. For this, Curly formulated a plan to frame him for pulling the fire alarm, and had it succeeded, Eugene would have gotten expelled.
- Evil Is Petty: Curly's reason for framing Eugene for pulling the fire alarm was because Eugene had used up his favorite pencil.
- Fire Alarm Distraction: The central focus of this episode; Eugene is accused of pulling the school fire alarm, and while everyone else thinks he is guilty, Arnold thinks he was framed. Arnold's right; it was Curly who pulled the fire alarm.
- Kangaroo Court: The trial for deducing who pulled the fire alarm goes through an unorthodox and unfair process, which makes Arnold's vindication of Eugene that much more effective.
- Karma Houdini: Eugene faces possible expulsion for pulling the fire alarm, but when it was revealed that Curly framed him, Curly never faced such a punishment, even after pulling the alarm again right in front of Principal Wartz. Or if anything, he was never sent to seek the psychiatric help that he so obviously needed.
- Mass "Oh, Crap!": The rest of the jurors are all rightly horrified as Curly descends into mad laughter after confessing he framed Eugene over a pencil.
- Noodle Incident: According to Arnold, the reason he doesn't think Eugene pulled the alarm is because the culprit left a Whacky Land pencil at the crime scene, and Eugene was banned from Whacky Land for somehow derailing their entire Thanksgiving Day parade. We're not given further details on how this happened, but with Eugene's luck it's anyone's guess.
- Pet the Dog: Whenever something bad happens to Eugene, it is usually Arnold's fault even though Arnold means Eugene no harm. In this episode, Arnold is the only one who believes that Eugene was framed and slowly gets the other members of the jury to believe it as well, eventually resulting in Eugene being proven innocent and saved from expulsion.
- Self-Serving Memory: Curly's recollection of Eugene using his pencil is presented as if Eugene was deliberately trying to destroy it for the sake of tormenting Curly
- Whole-Plot Reference: This episode is one to the 1957 drama film, 12 Angry Men. Specific elements used include:
- Harold, Phoebe, Gerald, Helga, Curly and Arnold have to figure out if Eugene pulled the fire alarm where the titular twelve angry jurors had to find out if the boy being accused of murder was guilty.
- Helga acts like Juror No. 3, who holds fast to his belief that the accused is guilty and often antagonizes Juror No. 8.
- Arnold being the only person to vote not guilty like there only being one man saying “not guilty” against the eleven jurors during the anonymous votes from both medias.
- Just like Juror No. 8 who voted “not guilty,” Arnold slowly gets the others to change their minds.
- A character has tickets to a sporting event, in the movie, it's baseball and here it's wrestling.
- Arnold stabs a pencil in the table like how Juror No. 8 does this with a knife.
"World Records" provides examples of:
- Consolation World Record: This episode has everyone in Hillwood try and fail to break a lot of world records, but end up breaking the record for the most record-breaking attempts to ever be attempted.
- Impossible Leavening: The kids of the city work on the world's biggest pizza puff in a bid to break a world record. All seems well until Sid reveals that he misunderstood "tsp" in the recipe. Instead of "teaspoons", he read it as "ten square pounds". The resulting explosion of dough takes a good deal of the next day to wash off the streets. This incident provides the page image.Arnold: Uh-oh.
Oskar: Look out, she's gonna blow!
