Sgt Frog Abridged - Episode 2R

Sgt Frog Abridged: Episode 2R
Season 1, Episode 2R
Air date	06/10/2010
Length	6:33
Created by	The Midnight Frogs
Link	YouTube
Episode guide
Previous Episode 1 (Retconned)	Next Episode 1 (canon)

Episode 2R of Sgt Frog Abridged served as an introductory episode for Tamama and Momoka. Like with the original Episode 1, the team has retconned the episode. A remake is set for July 2012, after SFA Season 2.

Episode Summary

After a brief cameo by a future character, Aki gives Keroro a room in the secret basement. The next day, Fuyuki's secret admirer Momoka appears (and just as quickly disappears), along with one of Keroro's missing platoon members.

Post-Credits

• Part 1: Tamama happily exclaims, "Today's episode is brought to you by cholesterol!"
• Part 2: Keroro goes to brush his toothbrush, which immediately explodes.

Cast (In Order of Appearance)

• Narrator - ThornBrain
• Aki Hinata - LillyLivers
• Natsumi Hinata - LillyLivers
• Sergeant Keroro - Mugiwara Yoshi
• Fuyuki Hinata - ThornBrain
• Momoka Nishizawa - LillyLivers
• Private Tamama - ThornBrain
• Sergeant Major Kululu - GhostTC
• Corporal Giroro - ThornBrain
• Lance Corporal Dororo - ThornBrain

Other voices

• Angol Mois - RenegadeFaith
• Omiyo - ThornBrain
• Solid Snake - ThornBrain
• Guy in the gym - Mugiwara Yoshi

Development Notes

Writing of script began during the casting of the series and the development of Episode 1R. The script went through two major overhauls since then. Voice actors recording their lines held back beginning the episode, one of the actors being dropped shortly afterward. Recording was completed before it was discovered that most of the lines and actions did not fit with the source video, further delaying the already-withheld second episode. As of March 15, the team were finally ready to resume recording and video assembly, and as of March 27 most of the lines had been recorded. At the end of March they found a new voice actor for Momoka, though they ended up also needing to find an understudy for her, a plan that ultimately fell through. The team decided to have their lead female VA, LillyLivers, voice Momoka. The episode was completed on Wednesday June 9th, after roughly five months since they began its development. The episode was uploaded that following midnight, with Thorn making an update inviting the show's viewers to make a reaction video to it and the upcoming Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Abridged video.

Staff Change

• Original co-writer DFatman was sacked from The Midnight Frogs mid-April during the episode's development, though (and partially because) he had not provided anything substantial to the episode. He had no input on the final draft of the script; he is not credited in the episode except for the episode title and theme.
  • DFatman was also in-line to voice Giroro, but Yoshi preferred Thorn's interpretation.
• The team went through three different VA's for Momoka before giving LillyLivers a try at her: Tom Newton, Al Vee, and BlueKurisu (Al Vee's original understudy). Tom was sacked due to problems with his voice-acting and turning in lines, then was completely removed when the script had to be re-hauled a second time, making his recordings unusable. Al Vee would later appear in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Abridged as Kangaskhan, her only appearance with The Midnight Frogs.

Promo

On the night of May 1st, the team posted a promo for Episode 2R that was mostly irrelevant to the actual episode. It consisted of Keroro playing by himself with a board game, pretending to be the other members of his platoon that had not yet been introduced. The video hints at the problems the Midnight Frogs team constantly had with Momoka's voice actors. Yoshi voiced his characters as did Thorn, though Thorn also voiced Kululu and a brief clip of Momoka to speed up the video-making process.

The video is notably the first to feature Thorn as Giroro and Dororo, and the only time he voiced Kululu. The video was set to "unlisted" in late-June 2011, coinciding with the official retconning of SFA1R and SFA2R. It can be accessed directly with this link.

Joke References and Explanations

• Angol Mois's intro dialogue is an exaggeration of the original Sgt Frog character's attraction to and feelings for Keroro. This was drastically pulled back for the character's introduction episode.
• The Narrator's line, "It's not like we're gonna see this shot every episode", is a fourth wall-breaking admittance that Thorn believed he would be using that shot of the Hinata house in almost every SFA episode. He was also under the assumption that the angle on the shot was used in every original Sgt Frog episode as well, though that is not the case.
• Aki's opening line, "And that's what a period really is," is a call-back to Fuyuki's non-sequitor in Episode 1R. Aki and Natsumi's short discourse at this time is also a call-back to the events of the previous episode, wherein Natsumi was twice captured and tied-up.
• Natsumi's reaction to Keroro calling her a "pink-haired virgin" is one of many hints that she is secretly into bondage and/or rape, first hinted at with her Freudian-slip in Episode 1R.
• When Aki reveals the basement, Fuyuki asks, "where did this basement come from?" Aki's response, "You sound like your father when he left", is a reference to their father who, in both SFA and the original Sgt Frog, never appears and is almost never mentioned.
  • Her response is a hint that the father left after Fuyuki was born, and that Fuyuki may have been unplanned.
• When Keroro's room is revealed, Aki reveals that she put everything there because she "like[s] to plan ahead". This means that she was so desperate for inspirations for her manga that she set up the basement room just in case an alien appeared.
  • The magazine on the wall, though likely titled "Nomo", is played up as reading "Homo". This is a possible hint that Aki prepared so precisely for the exact events that took place, that she expected the oncoming alien would also be gay.
• Replacing the background behind Fuyuki with a truck was originally done for comedic effect alone. It has since become an example of a minor running gag involving Fuyuki, where random, inexplicable events happen to him and he is fully aware of them. Another example would be him suddenly appearing in the Pokemon world in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Abridged, which was written after (but developed during while waiting for) Episode 2R.
  • Another example of this is later in the episode, where Fuyuki's image appears in a volleyball. Fuyuki's voice is heard saying, "And now I'm in a ball? What the hell's going on?"
• Fuyuki takes roll of people in his club when there is nobody there. After the Narrator begins talking over him, he can barely be heard trying to differentiate between a "Bill" and a "William".
• This is the first appearance of Solid Snake and his tendency to reference the Metal Gear Solid franchise when a character makes a mistake, under the guise of the reference being "advice". In this case, Snake references the staple use of cardboard boxes in the MGS franchise as hiding places.
  • So far, Fuyuki is the only character to directly mention Snake's presence, or even seem to notice Snake at all. This is another hint that Fuyuki is aware that completely random things occur around him.
• When Fuyuki asks Momoka, "What's up?", she begins listing off things that are literally "up": the ceiling, the sky and the clouds.
• Keroro's line "Gee, it sure is boring around- DOH" is a reference to the infamous Zelda game Link: The Faces of Evil for the Phillips CD-i. The fist pounding Keroro on the head for his comment is also a joke at how the CD-i games are over-referenced and otherwise stale material.
• When Tamama is introduced, he briefly references the Doodle Bug, a flatulent creature in the GameCube game Pikmin 2. Both Yoshi and Thorn are big Pikmin fans.
• Momoka's line, "But I'm wearing a skirt!", in reaction to the Kero Ball saying, "Drop the pans, bitch", is a subtle hint that she misheard what it said, and actually heard "Drop the pants, bitch".
• Making Keroro and Tamama both gay developed out of the months that writers Yoshi and Thorn spent playing the characters over Skype. Thorn sees making the two unambiguous as a sort of gay-empowerment, and also prevents the gay-related jokes from being making fun of homosexuality, (though Yoshi and Thorn consider themselves straight, they've made their gay rights advocacy known on the Midnight Frogs channel).
  • This would be subverted by Episode 10, when Tamama would reveal that he is actually a girl, and Keroro goes through a sort of "straight-panic".
• When Keroro introduces Tamama, he calls him "my jelly-"; subsequently, Momoka, dazed from having pans dropped on her, says "you didn't get the peanut butter...", effectively making a sandwich joke.
• Keroro's comment at the Narrator talking as being "just the Gundam models" is from a potential-running joke that was dropped about Keroro being schizophrenic in relation to the Gundam models. The team would almost never reference Gundam after this episode.
• Kululu mentioning Bill Nye and Mythbusters is a play on his science-based characteristics and related expectations; he's simply mentioning the most generic science-related things to be crowd-pleasing, something that clearly doesn't amuse Kululu himself. This personality trait/direction would be dropped by the time Jpace92 became Kululu's voice actor.
• Dororo/Zeroro wrong names/puns:
  • Zerodo - At the time, the platoon do not know that Dororo changed his name from Zeroro, which was his original name.
    • "Zerodo" is a play on "Dorodo", a long-running inside joke between the writers based on a bad audition video for the character that the team watched in early January, wherein the auditioning boy says the character's name incorrectly. Such poor audition videos were part of the inspiration for Yoshi and Thorn's joke video, "Really Shit Drawings of a Japanese Pokemon Thing by MYTB ROCK ON HOMIES".
  • Sven - Spoken by Kululu, and was actually contributed by Kululu's then-VA, GhostTC.
• Keroro suddenly speaking Spanish when he cleans the house is a play on the Hispanic maid/housekeeper stereotype; team leader Yoshi is Dominican.
  • "Quatro" was Thorn's first response when Yoshi suddenly began speaking Spanish during the scriptwriting.
• Both Giroro's comment "I'm going to put C4 in your toothpaste; call me a pedo again, I dare you", and Keroro's toothbrush blowing up in the Post-Credits, are callbacks to Keroro describing Giroro as a "pedophile veteran" in Episode 1R.
  • The fact that Keroro was brushing his toothbrush and not his teeth is due to a large typo on Yoshi's part during the scriptwriting; because he wasn't paying attention, he originally wrote the line as "I'm going to brush brush my toothbrush". Thorn liked the idea of Keroro brushing his toothbrush as opposed to his teeth, so the line stayed (sans second "brush").

Established Running Gags

Although the team are dissatisfied with Episode 2R and intend to remake it like with Episode 1R, a number of running gags originate in this episode, primarily in the second half:

• The use of the droning "Nurrrrr", though it would be spoken from now-on as opposed to written in text
• Solid Snake appearing randomly and giving advice
• Characters getting Dororo's/Zeroro's name wrong
• Tamama being referred to as a "fagmuffin": a very cute gay character
• Keroro (and occasionally other characters) speaking in Spanish
• The appearance of the numeral "4" in various places (9 would eventually join it)

Music Used In-Episode

• "Ordon Village" - The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess OST - first scene
• "Tekno Gunsou" - Keroro Gunsou OST - general background music
• "The Family and the Fishing Net" - Peter Gabriel, Security - intro drone used when background goes dark and ominous
• "Keroro Gunsou" - Keroro Gunsou OST - Keroro and Fuyuki rescuing Tamama
• "Batman Begins theme" - Batman Begins Soundtrack - the silhouettes of Keroro's platoon

Reception

Episode 2R was received very positively, with a number of people finding the episode to be an improvement over Episode 1R. As of June 25 when it was officially retconned, the video had 95 "likes" and 0 "dislikes".

Additional Trivia

• The episode was officially retconned on June 25, 2011.
• This is the first episode to feature GhostTC as his character Kululu, as well as the first and last to feature RenegadeFaith as her character Angol Mois. Ghost would leave the team after only appearing in two episodes, and RenegadeFaith would be removed before Mois's proper introduction when voicing the character did not work out. The episode was also the last to have residual influence from former co-writer DFatman; he wrote the very first script draft, and a couple of his jokes remained in the final draft.
• SFA Episode 2R is actually comprised of parts of two Sgt Frog episodes, the very beginning of episode 1 and the first half of episode 2.
• When Thorn first thought up the phrase "peeping Tina", he was not aware that it was, in fact, the legitimate female-equivalent of "peeping Tom". Yoshi discovered this immediately after.
• Yoshi and Thorn recorded a commentary of Episode 2 on November 9 and uploaded it the following midnight, roughly five months after its release.