Release date: November 20, 2020
First episode of Season 1, Part 2.
Opening line: (Yakko) "Illegal in Bahrain-y!"
WhoDonut: Wakko discovers that someone has eaten his designer donuts while he was sleeping. His siblings promise to help him discover who did it.
Mousechurian Candidate: Brain plans to run for President, and he genetically alters a mouse to serve as his ideal First Lady.
Starbox and Cindy: A tiny alien overlord tries to escape the clutches of a cute little girl.
Tropes found in "WhoDonut":
- Black Comedy: Yakko gets electrocuted by Wakko and Dot when he makes corny puns. After they do this 4 times, he dies, comes back as a ghost and gets electrocuted again. See Lame Pun Reaction as mentioned below.
- Gratuitous Spanish: After using the TV remote to silence Wakko's screaming, Yakko accidentally hits the "SAP" option, making Wakko speak in Spanish. Dot asks if they could do the entire episode in Spanish, but Yakko refuses as his accent is "muy terri-blegh"
- HA HA HA—No: Nora bursts out into incredulous laughter when the Warners accuse her of eating Wakko's donuts, saying she would never risk losing her spot in The Singularity by eating refined sugar.
- I Knew It!: In-Universe, Yakko and Dot admit that the "twist", that Wakko ate his donuts while sleepwalking, was predictable.
- Lame Pun Reaction: Wakko and Dot are less than impressed with Yakko's sudden Pungeon Master tendencies and zap him with the "pun gun" every time he makes one to the point that Dot apparently kills him. She even zaps his ghost before it can ascend to heaven.Yakko: (After getting zapped) Worth It...
- Laughing Mad: When the Warners accuse Nora of eating Wakko's donuts, the fitness nut simply snaps at the mere thought of herself consuming refined sugar. The Warners take this as a proof of her innocence and slowly leave the room.
- Ocular Gushers: Wakko does this when he can't find his donuts.
- Opening Shout-Out: When Yakko suggests solving the mystery by "going back to the beginning", the theme song starts to play before he clarifies.Yakko: No, stop! STOP! I meant the hipster neighborhood where Wakko bought those donuts, you dumb whoever-you-are!
Director: Okay, fine! And I'm not dumb! - "Shaggy Dog" Story: It turns out Wakko ate the donuts in his sleep.
- Shout-Out:
- When Dot comes to the conclusion that Ralph is just a pasty in a bigger scheme, she shouts "Keyser Soze! Red pill/blue pill! Forget it, Ralph, it's Chinatown!"
- Wakko jumping on the couch while eating donuts is just about singing a donut version of "Tubthumping."
- Shown Their Work: The container of dinosaur-shaped vitamins has a label saying "Now with feathers!" accompanied by a Super-Deformed illustration of a feathered Tyrannosaurus rex. This is clearly a reference to modern discoveries of feathered dinosaurs.
- Speak in Unison: Yakko and Dot get into one when they both predicted that Wakko ate his donuts.
- Slapstick: Dot is hit by the same truck as Yakko and Wakko while tailing the ant carrying a donut crumb, and is later splashed in the face by the tea at the end due to her, Yakko and the bats hanging from the ceiling.
- Sleepwalking: Er, sleepeating. It turns out Wakko himself is the culprit, as he'd simply eaten the donuts in his sleep. Yakko and Dot lampshade how much of an Un Twist this is.
- Spoiled Brat: The cashier at the donut shop is a Hipster who resents her father and wants to anger him, even though he owns the store she works at and by her admission is extremely supportive of her.
Tropes found in "Mousechurian Candidate":
- Call-Back: Brain's run-for-President scheme seems to be an updated version of the one from "Meet John Brain" in the original Animaniacs series.
- Composite Character: Julia seems to be a mix of Billie and Snowball from the original Pinky and the Brain series; she’s a genetically spliced lab mouse set up as a Love Interest for Brain (Billie), but she’s as smart as (if not smarter than) him, and becomes an Evil Former Friend bent on revenge against him at the end (Snowball).
- Double Meaning: Julia decides that she should "stop speaking from the Brain, and start speaking from the Heart". After earlier being elected the new Senator instead of Brain, she eventually abandons his agenda with her own.
- Gone Horribly Right: Brain expects Julia to help him through his campaign, but she becomes such an endearing public figure that she becomes a write-in candidate and wins by a landslide, while Brain doesn't receive a single vote.
- Green-Eyed Monster: Brain is clearly jealous of Julia's political success and social skills.
- Literal Metaphor: After Julia wins Brain's maze competition, Pinky comments that all his money was on another test subject. Said test subject has a bundle of money tied to its back.
- Mind-Control Device: Brain installs a "obedience chip" in Julia in order to control her. Unfortunately, it malfunctions and causes her to go insane.
- Nightmare Face: Julia makes plenty of them during her climactic Freak Out.
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: The moderator at Julia's debate is 'Raquel Madcow'.
- Sequel Hook: After Brain's plan to control Julia backfires, and she seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth, we see that she's secretly plotting her revenge against Brain.
- Shout-Out:
- The machine that transforms Julia is modeled after the teleportation chambers from The Fly (1986).
- Brain's speech about children's small hands being the best for building bombs is reminiscent of a line in Schindler's List. In Schindler's case, it was an excuse to save Jewish children by "claiming" them as workers; Brain, on the other hand, is entirely serious.
- Super-Strength: After her Freak Out at the debate, Julia (who, we remind you, is a mouse) is somehow able to pick up the human-sized podium and throw it through a wall.
- Tempting Fate: Julia tells Brain before her Presidential Debate that he may have given her the power of speech, but he will never control her. Unfortunately for her, he actually has the mean to do exactly that via control chip as a contingency.
- Unexpectedly Dark Episode: Between The Brain grabbing the Villain Ball, Julia's scary breakdown, the unnerving "What Now?" Ending, and the (eventually confirmed) implication that Nice Girl Julia might undergo a Face–Heel Turn because of Brain's desire to control her, this is a prime example.
- What's a Henway?: The second-place in the Senate election turns out to be a write-in vote for "Updog" and the newsreader falls for it, asking "What's Updog?" on live TV.
- Xanatos Speed Chess: After Brain fails to become senator of Iowa and Julia is elected instead, he decides to make her the President, with him acting as The Man Behind the Man.
- You Monster!: Juila says this to Brain when he reveals that he implanted a mind control chip in her. Brain retorts "Ah, ah, ah. You mean you genius!"
Tropes found in "Starbox and Cindy":
- Art Shift: The art direction is noticeably different from the rest of the show, with the characters having thick, colored outlines with more realistic designs and the backgrounds having a painterly look.
- Breather Episode: This segment is more light-hearted than the unexpectedly dark Pinky and the Brain segment before it.
- Butt-Monkey: Starbox suffers all sorts of slapstick indignities trying to escape Cindy's clutches.
- Dragged into Drag: Starbox is forced to wear a dress by Cindy.
- Exposed Extraterrestrials: Starbox does not wear anything.
- Lilliputian Warriors: Despite being doll-sized to humans, Starbox and his species are ruthless intergalactic conquerors.
- Suspiciously Similar Substitute: For either "Buttons and Mindy" (the adventures of a little girl and her long-suffering non-human partner, though this time, it's the human (albeit unintentionally) keeping the non-human out of trouble, and said non-human actually deserves their Butt-Monkey status), "Randy Beaman Kid" (both involve young kids prone to telling rambling monologues), or Pinky, Elmyra & the Brain (a would-be conqueror ends up in the home of a little girl who torments him and ruins his plans, of which some fans think this segment took the premise of that show and did it right).
- Thick-Line Animation: This segment uses thicker outlines for the characters; it's especially noticeable on Starbox.
