Web Animation / Fizzy's Lunch Lab

Fizzy’s Lunch Lab was a series of animated shorts created by PBS Kids to teach kids about nutrition and keeping the body healthy. The eponymous Professor Fizzy is a friendly Mad Scientist chef who is assisted by two children named Avril and Henry. He also has his robot teakettle Mixie-Bot, a sentient mixing cup named Corporal Cup, a taxi-driving cell named Sully, and a band called Freezer Burn. The enemy of the Lunch Labbers is Fast Food Freddy, the owner of the disgusting fast-food restaurant/theme park Greasyworld. He (with the occasional help of his nephew) constantly tries to take down the lunch lab so that more kids will eat at his restaurant instead.

The series can be divided into different categories of video:

• Webisodes: Shorts featuring the whole crew in the Lunch Lab, with Fast Food Freddy trying to sabotage them in some way. Occasionally, they end with Freezer Burn singing a song about the nutrient that was the topic of that webisode.
• Mixie Reports: Mixie-Bot talks to real-life people who are in food-related industries and finds out how they help their customers eat healthily.
• Corporal Cup's Food Camp: Corporal Cup explains a recipe to the audience.
• Freezer Burn: The eponymous band sings songs about health and nutrition.
• Lunch Lab Live!: Professor Fizzy interviews a food (or food-related object) and explains what kind of nutrients it has and how it functions in the body.
• Sully's Guide to the Human Body: Sully the Cell talks to parts of the human body and tells the audience what each part needs in order to function well.

Tropes present in Fizzy’s Lunch Lab include:

• Absent-Minded Professor: Fizzy can be this at times, but luckily he has Mixie and the kids to help him out.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot:
  • The Robo-Fizz 2000 was meant to stand in for the Professor when he was away on vacation, but Freddy reprogrammed it into making unhealthy snacks for everyone. Fortunately, Fizzy was able to revert his programming.
  • The game "Escape from Greasy World" has the three Greasy-Bots, who mistake Freddy making an offhand comment about not wanting Fizzy around as an order to capture the latter and everyone else at the Lunch Lab. Even Freddy is shocked by what they did, and outright teams up with the Lunch Labbers to take the final one down.
• Animate Inanimate Object: Corporal Cup, a mixing cup who acts like a drill seargent.
• Anthropomorphic Food: The members of Freezer Burn. Specifically, they're a popsicle, a bannana, and a bag of frozen peas.
• Ascended Extra: The Robo-Fizz 2000 only appears in one episode, but he ended up becoming a main character in the game "Escape From Greasy World".
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • The first webisode ("Attack of the Pizzanators!") is the only one that contains a real-life recipe, and it's also almost 7 minutes long. All future webisodes try to be around 4-5 minutes in length and don't have any real-life recipes within them.
  • The first three webisodes ("Attack of the Pizzanators!", "Jinormous Juicer", and "ROBOFIZZ 2000") end with a song by Freezer Burn. All later webisodes do away with the Freezer Burn songs.
• Edutainment Game: Most of the games on the website taught math and related concepts, which is a bit odd for a show based around nutrition.
• Luck-Based Mission: The game "Supermarket Mania" ends up amounting to this. If Freddy’s nephew reaches you, the game instantly ends, but how far he and you go depends on how many spaces you roll. You can also lose by getting four of Freddy's questions wrong, but it is far more likely that the nephew will reach you before that happens.
• Nutritional Nightmare: Downplayed. Freddy gives candy apples to Avril, which are really just candy lollipops in the shape of apples. Unsurprisingly, she eats too many and gets sick from all the sugar.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: In "Fast Food Franny", Fast Food Freddy is able to make Fizzy not recognize him by simply wearing a dress and a bow. It takes Mixie proving that "Franny" is really Freddy in disguise that the professor catches on.
• Picky Eater: Nelly Nitpick, the kid food critic who hates vegetables so much that she fails restaurants for merely showing vegetables in a meal. She ends up getting over this by the end of the episode, however.
• Robot Me: The Robo-Fizz 2000 and the Greasy-Bots both look like their respective creators.
• Straw Character: Fast Food Freddy, who exists solely to represent all the unhealthy fast-food restaurants of the world, along with representing an unhealthy lifestyle in general.
• Trojan Veggies: In one episode, Professor Fizzy visits a girl named Nelly Nitpick who doesn't like vegetables. He gives her a burger and she likes it. Fizzy then tells Nelly that it was a black bean burger. At first she is disgusted, but Nelly really likes the black bean burger anyway.