The Egg-pire Strikes Back

"The Egg-Pire Strikes Back" is a full-hour television special, based on the animated television series The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, that aired on April 25, 2003, on Nickelodeon. Its title parodies the Star Wars film, The Empire Strikes Back.

Plot

King Goobot and Ooblar from the movie Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius return to Retroville and they say they come in peace. Everybody at first is upset to see them but when the Yolkians begin to give them everything they want (Sheen with Ultralord, Sam with a hairpiece, and Hugh with a toy duck) they begin to trust them and make peace. However, Jimmy suspiciously knows that they are up to something evil to destroy Retroville (most likely in revenge of Goobot's humiliation in his defeat from the first film). When he tries to tell people that they are lying, the citizens won't believe him. So he puts a recording of the Yolkians through his lie detector and he finds out it is, in fact, a big lie, only to gain the townspeople's loyalty and turn them against Jimmy. He runs to tell his Mom and Dad and then he figures out that they have gone to the Retroville park for an announcement. And what he finds there is a giant egg that looks exactly like the one that the Yolkians' "chicken" god, Poultra, hatched out of in the original film. To Jimmy, this confirms his worst fears, but the citizens of Retroville are too turned by the Yolkians to listen to him. To Jimmy's surprise, the large egg does not contain a mutant carnivore chicken, but a shower of invitations to a party hosted by the Yolkians. This gets Jimmy rejected for being rude to the Yolkians. King Goobot tricks Cindy into making an alliance with them under the promise to make her own science lab for her and look better than Jimmy under the condition that she figures out how to get in Jimmy's own lab. Cindy invites Carl and Sheen to the Candy Bar and despite their attempts to not reveal Jimmy's secrets on the lab entrance Cindy uses a large ice cream sundae to force them to reveal the entrance code. She tells it to Goobot and awaits for her offered science lab. Jimmy begins to reconsider about the idea of the Yolkians being evil until he notices a spaceship bringing Poultra's water dish to earth. He fails to convince anybody to not attend the party that day.

Later, Goobot sneaks into Jimmy's lab and steals his DNA re-generator to re-create Poultra from Poultra's toenail, the last piece of her that contains her DNA. At the night of the party, Poultra is resurrected and as she charges towards the town Jimmy tries to warn everyone to run for their lives about the Yolkians stealing his DNA scanner, but they believe that he is lying and still their enemy, (and so does Libby, who announces to the townspeople that this is the Boring and Annoying Questioning), and they ordered him to leave.

Upon realizing that it was Cindy's fault that the Yolkians managed to steal Jimmy's scanner she frantically tells everybody to re-ally with Jimmy reminding him that he helped solve city crisis in the past while giving understood subtle hints to the town that she gave away the lab secrets. The townfolks agree to accept Jimmy back in their lives but Principal Willoughby tells them that he is not understanding a word Jimmy says untils he hears the evidence of the aliens' evil plan. After that, Poultra, along with Goobot and Ooblar, has been spotted by them. The townsfolk grow more receptive, just as Poultra arrives. With all the help Jimmy can get, he saves the night using the fact that "chickens can't burp". The citizens, who are alerted of Poultra's arrival, but unable to escape the party, help Jimmy into luring Poultra to drink a large tank of soda and eat a dummy made of what is essentially Pop Rocks, which Libby and Cindy sew together (with help from Goddard). When Poultra consumes the entire tank and eats the dummy, she cannot release the excess gas created by the soda and candy, and explodes due to the buildup of pressure. The end of the movie reveals that all the Yolkians (excluding their robotic shells) take off from the earth in a large container mounted on a rocket (the container holds the yolk-like alien bodies, as Yolkians seem to possess no evident skeletal structure). Everybody is forced to apologize to Jimmy for not listening to him earlier in the language of English once more, then French, and Chinese (though he was just kidding for the last one because no one knew it). Then there is a celebration.

Themes

This special deals with the theme of "children" not being "believed" by "adults", even when the "children" in question know and try to tell the truth about any given situation. Jimmy knows that the Yolkians are trying to destroy Retroville, but even before the townspeople were turned against him, they still didn't believe him. It wasn't until the citizens actually saw Poultra that they began to realize that Jimmy was right all along.

Reception

The movie received 4.16 million viewers and was the no. 1 scripted television premiere of that entire night.

See also

• List of The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius episodes