The second episode of the fifth season of Rugrats (1991).
Hiccups
When Tommy gets a bad case of hiccups, the other babies try to scare them out of him.
Autumn Leaves
The babies think the trees are sick when they shed their leaves, so they try to put the leaves back on the trees.
"Hiccups" provides examples of:
- Chekhov's Gag: At the beginning of the episode, Angelica finds a spider, which Stu traps under a bowl. Angelica later decides to use it as part of her scare machine.
- Epic Fail: After finishing her scare machine, when Angelica tries to use it on Tommy...it ends up falling apart and collapsing on her.
- Hiccup Hijinks: To get rid of Tommy's hiccups, Angelica builds a scare machine using various items she finds around the house. However, since she's a three-year-old with no experience building machines, and the scare machine was cobbled together by random debris, as soon as Angelica turns it on, it falls apart on top of her. Although Tommy was cured of his hiccups, it was because he was scared that Angelica was hurt after the "machine" fell on her.
- Here We Go Again!: After curing Tommy of the hiccups, Angelica now has them.
- It Kind of Looks Like a Face: In an unsuccessful attempt to scare Tommy, Angelica, disguised as the Boogieman, shows them what looks like a severed head. When Phil and Lil open the door, what looks like the severed head is revealed to be a bowl of spaghetti.
- Ominous Owl: Angelica adds a taxidermy owl from Lou's room to her "scream machine".
- Pumpkin Person: Angelica creates a "scream machine" to scare Tommy's hiccups away. The "machine" has a humanoid shape, and a Jack-O' Lantern decoration forming the head.
- Spiders Are Scary: At the beginning of this episode, Angelica is frightened by a spider near a bag of cookies. This causes Stu to spill his popcorn and set this episode's plot in motion.
- Spraying Drink from Nose: When Tommy tries to drink from his bottle while he has the hiccups, milk squirts out his nose.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: Stu Pickles completely disappears immediately after the first minute of the episode.
"Autumn Leaves" provides examples of:
- Children Are Tender-Hearted: The kids mistakenly think a tree is sick when it's shedding leaves and are worried about said tree, especially Chuckie, who feels responsible for this happening because he spilled some juice on the tree.
- Clothing Damage: After Stu believes the Leaf-Lifter to be malfunctioning when he sees the yard still filled with leaves (thanks in part to the babies taking the leaves out of the bag), he kicks it in frustration, and it sucks off his jacket and tears up his shirt and tie.
- Dramatic Irony: Chuckie becomes too queasy to drink his apple juice, and he spills it on the tree. Just afterwards, the babies notice how the leaves in the tree aren't green anymore, and Chuckie believes that he made the tree sick. However, before this scene, we are shown the colorful autumn leaves.
- Green Around the Gills: Chuckie's face turns green when his friends remind him how sick he was the previous day. Chuckie then suddenly becomes too queasy to even drink his apple juice.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Chuckie feels bad when he believes that he made the tree sick when he spilled his apple juice on it, and feels even worse when he believes that his and the other babies' attempts to make the tree better result in the tree losing all of its leaves.
- Noodle Incident:
- Chuckie is said to have had a cold before the events of this episode.
- Lou mentions to Didi that Stu tried to wrap his trees in plastic a year before this episode's events to keep the leaves off his lawn.
- When Chuckie tells Tommy that giving apple juice to a tree that isn't an apple tree is like giving bird food to a goldfish, Phil and Lil suddenly realize that they weren't supposed to do that, which is how their pet goldfish got sick and eventually flushed down the toilet.
- "Shaggy Dog" Story: On their way to the park, the babies find out that Chuckie didn't make the tree sick after all, and that shedding leaves is just something that trees do in autumn, so they didn't have to try to make the tree better after all.
- Sick Episode: A downplayed example; Chuckie is not actually sick, but had a cold before the episode's events, and he also believes the trees, which are changing their leaves, to be sick.
