Going Off the Sheep End
Original air date: 12/8/2000
In the fourth episode of Sheep in the Big City, Sheep tries to get Swanky's attention by making changes to himself.
"Going Off the Sheep End" contains examples of:
- Anthropomorphic Food: A pizza delivery guy presents a magical pizza to a crowd promising to grant wishes if they give him five dollars.
- Be Yourself: The moral of the episode, where Sheep tries to court Swanky by having his wool rearranged into a stylish hairdo, gaining a humanoid nose through plastic surgery, and bulking up at the gym (actually, becoming a grotesque mass of muscles from Oxymoron muscle powder), only for Swanky to keep rejecting him. After he ditches his muscles and returns to normal, he gets it through his head that he doesn't need to improve his appearance to win Swanky's affections.
- Cast from Lifespan: Oxymoron Batteries are extremely effective...because they suck the life out of whoever is using them to power the object they're holding. We see this in action with a flashlight. The slogan is even "The batteries that last as long as you do!"
- Contrived Coincidence:
- Sheep's various cosmetic procedures always grant him immunity to the Angry Scientist's latest plan: the "Steal Wool" magnet fails because all of Sheep's wool is on top of his head in a fancy haircut, and the "Stink Ray" doesn't work because Sheep's new nose makes him unable to smell anything. The Narrator both lampshades and complains about the coincidences.
- Sheep takes inspiration for the changes to his body with the help of conveniently-timed advertisements and comments from people on the street. For example, a little girl and her mother walking by start talking about "that huge nose," and he runs off to a plastic surgeon...somehow missing the fact that, for some reason, there's a giant sculpture of a nose in the street.
- Lady Richington fires Sheep from a cannon three times over the course of the episode. He always lands in a hot dog bun being given to a woman getting a meal in the park—and it's always the exact same woman buying from the exact same vendor. On the third occasion, she wonders aloud "Why do I keep coming here for lunch?"
- Covert Group with Mundane Front: General Specific and his soldiers disguise their so-called "Top Secret Military Base" as a bakery.
- Downer Ending: The initial ending of the episode sees the "freakishly huge" Sheep being rejected by Swanky and captured by General Specific. When the Narrator sees this, he immediately declares it far too grim and insists on a rewrite wherein Sheep escapes the army, wins Swanky's heart, gets Lady Richington to suddenly like him, and "wins the big race after all!" (Note that there was never any mention of any race, big or otherwise, in the episode.)
- Real After All: It seems like the "magical pizza," which can talk and grant wishes, is just a scam being run by a delivery guy. But once the angry crowd disperses, it's revealed that the pizza actually is magic—the delivery guy was just too stupid to properly control the situation. The furious pizza punishes him by pulling him into the pizza box, presumably to eat him.
- Revised Ending: The episode initially seems to end with Sheep being captured. However, the Narrator hates the way it ends so much that he demands the writers give Sheep the happy ending he deserves.
- Vampiric Draining: Oxymoron Batteries get their power by sucking the life energy out of whoever's using them.
