The Gang tries to relive their childhood by visiting a pizza place and entertainment center but become disillusioned with the changes they find.
This episode provides examples of the following tropes:
- Added Alliterative Appeal: One of the Risk E. Rat's characters is Dingbat Duck, later renamed to Dapper Duck- he has delectable duds and delightful diction.
- Alcoholic Parent: Dee, Mac and Dennis fondly remember their respective moms getting completely hammered in the padded bar.
- Artistic License – History: Risk E Rat has existed in-universe since the 1950s. In real life, Chuck E. Cheese wasn't created until 1977, and its direct inspiration, The Enchanted Tiki Room, wasn't open until 1963. Before then, mascot-based entertainment was mostly confined to theme parks and theater, rather than brick and mortar restaurants.
- Comically Missing the Point: When Dennis points out how offensive it is that the purple monster acted like a stereotypical black person, him and Charlie seem to think the problem is that he wasn't voiced by an actual black person.
- Deliberate Values Dissonance: The core theme of the episode.
- Mac is disappointed to see a lot of his childhood favorite toys and candies no longer exist due to safety concerns.
- Dee describes the ethnic humor that existed at Risk E. Rat's pizza in the '80s.
- Frank mentions that Risk E. Rat used to hit the kids and made fun of his alcoholic brother when Frank was a kid. He also mentions that the waitresses used to be deliberately set up to be sexually assaulted by attendees and weren't able to complain lest they lose their job. Dee is pretty horrified about hearing this.
- One of the characters had a stutter and was named "dingbat," which were both changed to reflect modern sensibilities.
- Ear Worm The Risk-E-Rat theme song encourages children to be highly irresponsible, and it's a bop.
- Easily Forgiven: How Mac views the current system for dealing with misbehaving kids in the arcade that were sent to the detention room; now, a licensed therapist will help them process the emotions that caused them to act out, and help improve their behaviour before sending them out. Mac views this as terrible because kids should be made to feel shame and guilt for their behaviour to learn not to do it, despite how that has clearly been ineffective given him being a grown man in his 40s being sent to the same detention room.
- Even Evil Has Standards:
- Frank calls one of the characters a "retard." Even Dee takes exception to this, though Frank defends himself by claiming he wouldn't call a human retarded.
- More Dennis and his Blue-and-Orange Morality line about underage, as the only non-Political Correctness Is Evil reason he'll accept for breasts being taken off is because she's supposed to be under 18.
- Dennis also seems to recognize that the purple monster in the band was meant to be a black caricature and is rather disturbed by the racism. Even he admits he's glad they're "updating" some of the older characters and gimmicks.
- Dee is disturbed by Frank's recollection about sexually assaulting the waitresses in his youth, moreso the fact Risk E. Rat deliberately set them up for it (by hiding pieces of plastic cheese the attendees were supposed to find on their uniforms without informing them), and would fire any who complained.
- Elephant in the Living Room: The Dennis/Charlie subplot has them agree they missed out on childhood, but again don’t name the actual reason why, and go off to see a robot girl’s boobs.
- Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: Dee, repeatedly, tries to explain why the characters were funny back in "her" day, and each time trails off when she starts to realise that the jokes were highly racist and ableist.
- Freeze-Frame Bonus: There's a brief shot of the face of the restored"Risk-E-Rat animatronic that looks absolutely horrifying.
- Gilligan Cut: The Gang prepares to give the kids a "classic" experience, with Frank telling them to open the doors for fun. Cut to firemen and emergency workers running outside a half-burned building, the robots laid out like corpses, screaming parents and traumatized children and the Gang just standing there, not accepting responsibility for any of the chaos.
- Honor Before Reason: As they reminisce about their childhoods, Dee, Dennis, and Charlie all at least seem to begin to realize that what they fondly remember was actually offensive and fucked up and seem to acknowledge that the changes are for the better. However they still protest the changes made despite that, and help try to restore Risk E. Rat to its former "glory".
- Hypocritical Humor:
- Dee and Frank fondly reminisce about the "ethnic humor" of the old Risk E. Rat (though unlike Frank, Dee is hesitant to admit it was racist), but take offense at the new, less offensive humor when they believe that it's racist towards white people (despite them assuming it's only because "white people don't have the accent to pull off the joke")
- When discussing Dapper Duck's former character, Dee describes his stutter, drooling, and other behaviors that Frank insists was because he was a "retard", yet she keeps insisting that its not OK to call him that. All the while doing an impression of him that's highly reminiscent of someone mocking a mentally disabled person, which she clearly thinks is funny.
- Irony: The gang goes to great lengths to restore the original animatronic band, only for their own actions to leave them all burned and destroyed.
- Laser-Guided Karma: Dee berates an employee when he cautions her that the mozzarella sticks she ordered are hot. Immediately after, she takes a bite from one and burns her mouth as a result.
- The gang commit multiple crimes for the sake of recreating the old band. As a direct result, the old band they loved so much ends up a huge pile of smoldering scrap metal and ruined costume bits.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: As the podcast has often disparaged early season non-satire of just showing blackface and words like "retard" instead of making a point, Risk E. Rat from the '50s and '80s can be seen as "early Sunny", and how the show can't and shouldn't go back to it.
- Manchild: Mac gets into an argument with a child and has to be sent to the time-out room even though he's a grown man.
- Mugged for Disguise: Dee is shown putting a Risk E. Rat employee in a stranglehold to knock him unconscious and steal his costume. She then puts it on herself to lure the kids into a waiting area for the "real fun" to begin.
- My Little Panzer: Mac looks forward to redeeming his tickets for Risk E's Rifle, a heavy gun that shot pebbles with "a good, smoky bang." He's outraged when the ticket-booth employee tells him they only offer orange space lasers now.Mac: How do I simulate real-world violence with something like that?Cashier: Why would you want to simulate real-world violence?
- Never My Fault: The Gang blames the kids not being able to handle the classic characters for whatever caused the chaos and destruction at the end of their performance.
- Noodle Incident: What the Gang did to cause the mass chaos at the end is not depicted or elaborated on.
- Paper-Thin Disguise: Frank distracts all of the parents at Risk E. Rat's by taking them to an onsite bar...which is just a room labeled with a crude cardboard sign with the word "BAR" hastily written on it in marker. Surprisingly, every adult is fooled—possibly because they're eager for booze after a day at Risk E.'s.
- Police Are Useless: After the police show up to the disaster scene, a woman desperately tries to point out to the cops that the Gang was responsible and "they're standing right there." The cops simply drag her away.
- Political Correctness Is Evil: Dennis initially blames "goddamn libs" for removing a character's breasts. Charlie points out this could be in response to religious conservatives, and Dennis agrees that both sides have gone too far.
- Running Gag: Once again, a character uses the phrase "move past it" to ignore a topic.
- Shout-Out:
- Risk E. Rat is an obvious one for Chuck E. Cheese. Several of the Risk E. Rat characters resemble the CEC characters.
- Justine the Teen Dream closely resembles Mitzi Mozzarella of The Rock-afire Explosion. She's also a lot like Lola Bunny, right down to having a controversy about her breasts.
- In the background of the arcade can be seen a SpongeBob SquarePants-themed ticket machine.
- Suck E. Cheese's: The Risk E. Rat's of the past was an unsafe children's play place, where the mascot would encourage kids not to wear helmets, saying "that's the bone is for!", and smack children in the back of the head. The modern Risk-E-Rat's goes into the exact opposite direction, becoming so tame that they even rebrand to take the word "risk" out of their name. Despite being clearly better, parents still eagerly accept earplugs from the waiters when the band starts to play and fall for the obviously fake bar because they're so desperate to get booze.
- Symbolism: Risk-E-Rat goes out of its way to bury its problematic past, only to end up being destroyed by it.
- Take Our Word for It: Once the Gang is ready to start the show they've prepared, Frank instructs them to open the doors for fun. After he turns on the power to the show, we cut to a scene of mass chaos outside the building, and the Gang just assumes those in attendance couldn't handle the "fun".
- Take That!: To "it was better/less PC in my day" whining, as what the Gang is nostalgic for ranges from creepy to abusive, and they pathologically can't understand that. Even when the gang agrees Frank's nostalgia is bad, they can't acknowledge the flaws of their own.
- To a lesser extent, the episode also takes obligatory potshots at political correctness itself. The new characters are highly sanitized and saccharine, the employees are so sheltered they think cigarettes are illegal, and the business is in such a fervor to "modernize" itself they go as far as literally sanding a character's breasts off. Still, with how horrible the original place was by the gang's own descriptions, the over-correction is understandable.
