Headscratchers / Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius

• Why did only the adults look tasty to the Yolkians? Shouldn't children be like veal for them? Or is it like fruit to them, and they need to age and ripen? (I freely admit to not seeing the movie in years, so I don't know if it is explained, I just don't remember if there is one)
  • Well, the adult humans were supposed to be sacrificed to the Yolkians' giant chicken god. No one was about to become lunch for a Yolkian. The kids, I think, were too small to be considered by the Yolkians as anything other than an insult to their god if used as a sacrifice, especially when there is a planet full of much larger humans within range of their fleet.
    • Confirmed by King Goobot sentencing the rescue party to the dungeon "until they are of worthier size."
  • "Shouldn't children be like veal for them?". Ew
  • Maybe the children are more like baby chicks than veal. Baby chickens don't taste anywhere as good as their mothers do.

• Why could the kids breathe in space? Kind of kills the premise.
  • "Good question, Sheen, and the answer is quite interesting. You see..." "Moon moon moon! Spoon spoon spoon! June June June! Spitoon spitoon SPITOOOOON!"
  • Word of God is that they considered designing space suits for the kids, but ended up deciding that they would only get in the way of their facial expressions.
  • It's not uncommon to have characters breathe in space in cartoons.
  • In the world of Jimmy Neutron, "there is no air in space" is a myth. Jimmy knows this.
  • There are two “realistic” explanations I can think of for this. One, Jimmy and the kids equipped their rocket-rides with invisible, permeable air pockets that also recycled their carbon dioxide into fresh oxygen when necessary. That, or Jimmy has altered his biology to survive in a vacuum and did the same for the other Retro Town kids. And before anyone says anything about how impossible either of those are, I would like to remind them that this is the same kid who created a functional Shrink Ray, Energy-based Toothbrush, a plant biologically engineered to attack girls, and an entire underground base full of similar experiments, ALL before puberty.

• How come Goddard's radar didn't pick up Ms. Fowl when Jimmy asked Goddard to scan for adults?
  • I'd like to think that it was because Ms. Fowl was shrunk and she was too small to be detected.
  • Apparently Goddard's radar has a separate categorization for senior citizens.

• So, in "Clash of the Cousins", Jimmy realizes there's another genius in his family trying to sabotage a wedding, so he has Goddard isolate the "genius gene" and run a comparison of all adult family members. Of course, none of them match up (the real culprit is his baby cousin Eddy), but you've got to wonder why he bothered. Why didn't he ever consider the possibility he was dealing with a child genius, considering he's one himself?
  • There's a pretty big difference between "child genius" and "baby genius". Even if he had noticed Eddy had it, he probably would have dismissed him out of hand as not old enough to cause trouble yet.

• How did the aliens know how to get to Earth?
  • Ok, I know this movie came from 2000 but maybe they used GPS? I legit don't know if GPS existed in 2000 or if people uses them in 2000 or if aliens actually use GPS, especially in places that isn't Earth.
    • Probably happened like how it did in Invader Zim: Because they wanted to conquer multiple planets they just fly around space until they find one to conquer.
    • Jimmy’s little toaster-satellite was launched straight from Earth’s orbit, it’s not entirely unlikely that the Goo-Aliens just followed its trajectory to find Earth. Moreover, it’s likely that the toaster didn’t even go all that far. The only propellant it had was being thrown by Jimmy and then having agitated soda propel it just enough to escape Earth’s gravity, so it’s not going very fast. And, since Jimmy commented that’s it’s been a full school day, we can assume that it’s only been about 8 hours or so since he launched said toaster, so it definitely didn’t have long enough to escape the solar system. It’s possible that the Goo-Aliens were already near or even INSIDE the solar system already, and Jimmy’s toaster message only let them know that Earth had life on it.
    • King Goobot outright tells Jimmy "without the coordinates you gave us, we never would've found your puny little planet". Said coordinates were probably at the end of the message Jimmy sent, which we didn't get to see since King Goobot had it stopped partway to comment on the humans looking "delicious".

• While everyone is at Retroland having the time of their lives, Cindy is at home with Libby practicing her Tai Chi while Libby is trying to pick out a new ring tone for her phone, with no suggestion that they ever left the house. So wouldn't they have been home at the time that Cindy's parents were abducted by the Yolkians? Wouldn't they have heard Cindy's parents scream when they were being beamed up? Or saw the spaceships through the window? Because later when everyone gathers at Jimmy's house to get answers about their parents' disappearance, Cindy just as demanding to know of her parents' absence, and as far as we know, she never left the house & was home at the time when her parents were taken. Also, Goddard was present at home too when Jimmy's parents were abducted. Why didn't he instantly alert Jimmy instead of waiting two days before he showed Jimmy the simulation of his parents saying goodnight to him? He could've told/alerted/notified Jimmy about the abduction way beforehand.
  • It could have happened after she'd already gone to sleep; it was a school night after all, and she didn't have Jimmy's motivation to stay up late.

• When Jimmy has Goddard do a full on scan of Retroville to scan for any signs of adults anywhere within Retroville the scanners says no signs of adults anywhere, yet there were possibly several adults present at Retroland with their kids and those who were operating the rides. So if there are no more adults anywhere in town during the time during the time when the kids were all out enjoying themselves in Retroland, then who were operating the rides since children aren't allowed to operate heavy machinery?
  • Jimmy and friends see one of the retreating spaceships (mistaking it for a shooting star) on their way home. Maybe the abduction happened after Retroville closed down for the night, and all the adult workers or chaperones were abducted on their way home.

• The final scene has Hugh and Judy constantly burping after taking a sip of Jimmy's burp soda, keep in mind they only took one sip each, when this soda is introduced, Jimmy notes that it's one burp per sip, so did the two parents both take one very big sip?
  • Yes. They both audibly swallow large gulps, not just tiny sips that Jimmy was presumably referring to.
  • "Guaranteed one burp per sip", meaning you'll get at least one burp, if not more.
• In the scene where the humans are being examined by King Goobot, why did he say the humans looked hardly appetizing when in earlier in the movie he said as Goobot looked at Jimmy's parents "they look DELICIOUS!!" so why did he say the humans didn't look very good?
  • The picture he saw was a polaroid being recorded on a repurposed toaster. It's almost certain it was lower quality than seeing them in person, so he might have assumed that they looked worse in the image than they actually were.

• Why did it take a whole day for Jimmy of all people to realize the letter was a fake sent from the aliens? Wouldn't "son/daughter" used instead of a name be a massive red flag?
  • Given that this is right on the heels of him wishing that his parents weren't around so he could have all the fun he wanted, he probably just wanted to believe it, at least for the time, and didn't ask questions until it was clear the lack of parental guidance was doing more harm than good.

• Okay, how the hell did Sheen manage to steal and pilot away an alien ship without any problem?
  • Most of the Yolkiens were probably at the sacrifice ceremony, and any lingering guards were probably pulled there once Jimmy and company started causing a ruckus. Sheen might not have had that much resistance to deal with.
    • Considering how active the starship port Jimmy indicated seemed even while the kids were IN the stadium, there would probably still be quite a few guards and security forces present. But, that question was more the logistics of it. Sheen would have had to travel to the port and either Ultra-Lord (kick serious alien ass) or Solid Snake (sneak through everything) his way to the ship, and then figure out the ship’s controls, before single-handedly piloting his way down to the stadium, all within a half-hour at absolute maximum. And considering Sheen isn’t all that bright….

• How did the Yolkians and their many ships manage to swoop down to Retroville, abduct every adult and depart without the military intercepting? The Air Force was able to detect Jimmy's homemade rocket ship, declare it a bogey, and fighter jets caught up to him in no time so assuming the launch site was in Retroville, it must be fairly close by so someone would have seen all the ships hovering over the city, especially since the ships aren't using any cloaking devices. It would not have been possible for them to also abduct every adult on the base because even if they snuck up with cloaking devices, they'd be pretty quickly shot down after the first few personell were abducted. It'd be like trying to abduct a kid from an NRA meeting.
  • 1) We don't actually know how long it took (in-universe time) for the jets to catch up to Jimmy, so for all we know there might be enough distance between the base and town to make visual confirmation a non-option (especially at night), and 2) just because the ship couldn't turn invisible doesn't mean thay wouldn't have some way of circumventing radar.
    • Actually, the launch site appeared to be Area 51, which is located in Nevada. Word of God states that Retroville is located in Texas, which is quite a fair distance from Nevada. There's a chance that Jimmy just happened to fly over it on his way to deploy the satellite.
• Jimmy's parents won't let him go to Retroland's opening because it's a school night, which begs the question - why would a kid-friendly theme park open on a school night? It seems like that would be bad for business.
  • It could have been a test run/soft opening, theme parks do it all the time with their rides. Chances are that the grand opening is on a weekend.