Clara's Dirty Little Secret
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"Clara's Dirty Little Secret" is the second episode of the animated series Drawn Together.
Storyline
Template:Spoiler Weeks have passed since Clara's first encounter with Foxxy, and she's spent the entire time telling everyone the story non-stop, to the delight of all of the houseguests except Toot. Thinking Clara needs to be taken down a peg, Toot convinces Clara that she's pregnant with Foxxy's child. Foxxy decides to set everyone straight by giving the houseguests a sex-ed class, but rather than making her happy she can't be pregnant, Clara becomes despondent.
Foxxy confronts Clara to find out what the problem is. Clara reveals that after Foxxy's lesson (which stressed the importance of a woman's vagina), she now realizes that she will never be able to find happiness, since no man will ever want to come near her intimate areas. Foxxy tries to tell Clara that regardless of what her father might have told her, her vagina is a beautiful place, but Clara proves otherwise by revealing that her vagina is a gigantic, tentacled monster, the result of a curse placed upon her by her not-so-Evil Stepmother.
Although gentle on the surface, the Octopussoir (as Clara calls it) is revealed to be extremely sensitive to loud noises. Toot wastes no time exploiting this weakness, and deliberately disturbs the Octopussoir, causing it to destroy the furniture in the living room, and consume Wooldoor (and a cameraman). Despite Foxxy's attempts to protect her, the other houseguests temporarily adopt desperate measures and chase Clara before an alternative is found.
According to the Stepmother, only the kiss of her true love can break the curse. During a Bachelorette-type contest in which men compete to be Clara's true love, she meets Prince Charming, the man of her dreams. However, his kiss, rather than curing her curse, causes his penis to turn into an octopus itself. Dismayed at his new condition, Prince Charming commits suicide.
Since the curse now appears unremovable, the houseguests once again take up arms to kill the Octopussoir. Clara tries to show them that the Octopussoir is actually quite nice and likes to help people, but it is not until the Octopussoir begins cleaning the long-dormant pile of dirty dishes in the sink that everyone realizes that it's not such a bad creature after all. The houseguests all come to terms with Clara's Octopussoir, and Clara makes peace with her Stepmother. The episode ends with Wooldoor being expelled from Clara's vagina.
Musical Number: "La-La-La-La-Labia", a Hanna-Barbera style song sung by Foxxy and the houseguests a'la Josie and the Pussycats during a montage in which everyone chases Clara's vagina. Lyrically, the song is basically a long string of vagina metaphors.
Notes and inside references
- When Clara tells Foxxy and Toot about her curse through interpretive dance, Foxxy misinterprets the move for "stepmother" as "stepfather". After Clara corrects her, Toot looks in Foxxy's direction and says, "Duuuuuuuuhhhhhh!" while her mouth is animated with a severe overbite, like a donkey. This would mark the beginning of one of the show's most frequently employed running gags.
- In Foxxy's flashback where Wooldoor is dressed as a priest, he gives Clara a Christian bible, but curiously has an Egyptian ankh symbol on his sash. Wooldoor would also be depicted as a priest in several future episodes; his sash would have the ankh symbol on it in those appearances as well.
Cultural references
- Toot tells Clara that the only way to stop herself from being pregnant is to be pushed down a flight of stairs. Toot does this on the stairs in the house, but says it didn't work. Clara suggests the M.C. Escher room; M.C. Escher was a Dutch artist famous for a lithograph print named Relativity, which depicts a room made up entirely of staircases, all of which lead to nowhere and normal laws of gravity do not apply. The M.C. Escher room that Toot and Clara visit is a duplicate of this lithograph.
- Clara falling down a flight of stairs while "pregnant" is reminiscent of Diana, Princess of Wales reportedly doing the same while pregnant with Prince William.
- The naked middle-aged man and woman featured in Foxxy's sex-ed class are a parody of the sex-ed book Where Did I Come From?.
- Wooldoor's blocks spell out the message 2 PAC RIP, a reference to murdered rapper Tupac Shakur.
- When Ling-Ling decides he's had enough of doing the dishes, he holds up a sign that says "Lock Out." However, since he is refusing to work, as opposed to not being allowed to work, he is actually on strike.
- The scene where Wooldoor Sockbat gets pulled into Clara's vagina and nearly crushed to death is a spoof on the infamous scene in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, where Luke, Han and Leia are trapped in one of the garbage smashers on the Death Star, but are saved from being crushed by C-3PO and R2-D2 shutting it down. When Clara's vagina begins to close in on Wooldoor, he calls out, "3-PO! 3-PO!" on what looks to be a commlink.
- The scene where Xandir cowers while Clara's vagina corners him and sticks out its tongue is taken from the film Alien³.
- The scene where the screen splits into four frames depicting everyone in peril, with a time clock displayed, is a reference to 24.
- Foxxy's "neck-sprain well-lit pie diversion" is a reference to Scooby-Doo, which often featured villains deceiving people with false images created by highly implausible methods.
- The houseguests' chant of "Kill the beast!" originally comes from the novel Lord of the Flies. However, given that Clara is a Disney spoof, the show is more directly parodying Disney's Beauty and the Beast.
- Clara's Evil Stepmother is a spoof of the Wicked Stepmother, a stock character from fairy tales who occasionally appears in other works of fiction as well. Clara's stepmother in particular is based on Lady Tremaine from Disney's animated version of Cinderella.
- According to Clara's Evil Stepmother, the only way to break the curse on her vagina is to find true love, and true love's first kiss. This is a parody of Shrek in which the only way for Fiona's curse to be broken is for true love's first kiss.
- The character of Prince Charming is another stock fairy tale character, often used in stories as an idealized representation of the young female protagonist's true love. His kiss being required to break Clara's curse is based on stories (particularly "The Frog Prince") where the handsome prince has been transformed into a hideous creature of some sort, and the young woman's kiss is required to transform him back. "Beauty and the Beast" (which is also parodied in this episode) is a more complex version of this.
- The scene in which a bachelor begins crying in the back of a limo and rips open his shirt as he implores the other bachelor, "Make me feel good!" is a reference to the infamous Halle Berry/Billy Bob Thornton sex scene in Monster's Ball. According to the DVD commentary, the voices of the two bachelors are provided by creators Dave Jeser and Matt Silverstein.
- Prince Charming's penis transformation scene is a reference to princess Fiona's transformation scene in the movie Shrek, which itself is a parody of the beast's transformation in Beauty and the Beast.
- When Prince Charming shoots himself, he does not die, but his face is charred, and he blinks, reminiscent of the results of gunshots and explosions in Warner Brothers cartoons.
- The Octopussoir writes a check to Jews For Jesus, a controversial evangelical organization devoted to converting Jews to Christianity- exactly the kind of charity one might expect Clara to contribute to, given her religious views.
- At the end of the episode, after Wooldoor escapes from Clara's vagina, he counts off, "Uno, dos, one, two, tres, quatro", leading into a reprise of "La-la-la-la Labia". This is a reference to Sam the Sham's count-in at the beginning of the song "Wooly Bully".