Brain's Brain

"Brain's Brain"
Main image Title card
Season/Series:	19 (US)
Number in season:	1a
Original airdate:	January 18, 2016 June 4, 2015 April 29, 2015
Credits
Written by:	Peter K. Hirsch
Storyboard by:	Rich Vanatte
Episodes
Previous "Shelter from the Storm"	Next "Brain Sees Stars"

Read transcript

"Brain's Brain" is the first half of the first episode in the nineteenth season of Arthur.

Summary

Brain, D.W and Bud journey into Brain's brain.

Plot

In the introduction, Arthur and Buster stand in Buster's room and discuss the brain. When Brain thinks that the show is about him, they lock him in the closet. While they talk about memory and try to remember how much money Arthur owes Buster for a yogurt Buster bought him, five objects appear in the room. The boys ask the audience to remember those objects until the end of the show.

Brain's Brain

Brain paints eggs. He wants to hide them outside for the spring egg hunt, but it is already past midnight, so his mom sends him to bed.

The next morning, Brain oversleeps and has to hide the eggs in a hurry.

Arthur takes D.W., Emily and Bud over to the Powers’ house. The girls tell Bud about how tough Brain's egg hunts are. Bud claims to be the best finder in the world, so D.W. challenges him to a competition to see who can find the most eggs.

Brain explains that the eggs all have the names of famous scientists on them. During the egg hunt, Bud distracts D.W. by claiming that he saw a unicorn. D.W., in turn, jumps on Bud's back to reach an egg.

Eventually, Bud and D.W. tie for first place with seven eggs each. Brain realizes that one egg, Broca, is still missing, but he cannot remember where he put it.

Brain sits down in his darkened room and tries to remember. In a fantasy, he is about to hide the Broca egg when he falls down a hole and lands on the surface of his brain. He stops Bud and D.W. who want to dig for the egg, and they all fall into a library-like room. There, a hippo lady tells them about the various parts of the brain. Memories, like where Brain hid the egg, are stored in various places, so the hippo calls Pavel, a Czech bat, to guide the kids.

Pavel takes the kids to the brain stem, which controls bodily functions. Bud presses buttons on a dashboard, causing Brain to make weird faces.

Next, Pavel takes the kids to the frontal lobe, where they watch a group of small Brains argue whether the large Brain should eat a cookie or wait until after dinner. Large Brain stops the argument and decides in favor of the cookie.

Next, they visit the temporal lobe and see pictures from Brain's past ("Friday the 13th" and "The Contest"). When they see a small Brain painting the large Brain hiding the eggs, Bud wants to help him and knocks down his ladder.

This causes Brain to wake up and see that Bud and D.W. are searching his room. He tells them that he does not remember where he put the egg, but then he realizes that the Czech bat was a message from his brain telling him to check the bat house in the yard. He does find the egg there.

Bud and D.W. are still tied, but Brain offers for them to share the prize, a mathematical text. Then he tries to remember where he put that.

The episode finishes with Arthur and Buster in Buster's room. They reveal what the five objects from the introduction were. Brain comes in eating a cookie and Arthur says that both kinds of Brain/brain are amazing.

Characters

Major

• Brain
• D.W. Read
• Bud Compson

Minor

• Arthur Read
• Buster Baxter (opening)
• Mrs. Powers
• Emily Leduc
• Timmy and Tommy Tibble (no lines)
• Pavel
• Hippo
• Mini-Brains

Cameo

• Vicita Molina

Trivia

• The hippo's hands look like a cross between hands and hoofs. All other anthropomorphic characters on Arthur have regular human hands, regardless of their species.
• In the frontal lobe, Brain resolves a dispute over whether or not he should have a cookie. At the end of the episode, he is seen eating a cookie.

Episode connections

• The "not that Brain"-gag from the introduction is similar to the "not that Binky"-gag from the introduction to "Meet Binky".
• "And Now Let's Talk to Some Kids" gives an impression of what Arthur would be like if it was Brain's show.
• Brain's Brain appears in "It's a No-Brainer" as a character, not a location.
• Brain's memory of hitting a home run and his superstitious phase are both from "Friday the 13th".
• The laboratory scene refers to Brain's story in "The Contest". The art style is based on the cartoon series Dexter’s Laboratory. The pictures do not look exactly like they did in the original episodes.

Cultural references

• All of the scientists featured on the eggs are real, and are as follows:
  1. Aristotle (384-322 BC) – classical philosopher and polymath
  2. Frederick Banting (1891-1941) – co-discoverer of insulin
  3. Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) – inventor of the telephone
  4. Charles Best (1899-1978) – co-discoverer of insulin
  5. Roberta Bondar (1945-still alive) – neurologist; astronaut
  6. Niels Bohr (1885-1962) – chemist, discovered structure of atoms
  7. Pierre Paul Broca (1824-1880) – physician, studied the brain, particularly the frontal lobe
  8. Marie Curie (1867-1934) – groundbreaking work on radioactivity; discovered radium and polonium
  9. Herbert Dow (1866-1930) – founder of Dow Chemical Company
  10. Albert Einstein (1879-1955) – physicist, discovered special relativity
  11. Sandford Fleming (1827-1915) – inventor of world standard time; railroad engineer
  12. Ben Franklin (1706-1790) – politician and scientist
  13. Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) – astronomer and physicist
  14. Jane Goodall (1934-still alive) – biologist, studied behavior of chimpanzees
  15. Stephen Hawking (1942-2018) – theoretical physicist and cosmologist
  16. Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) – astronomer
  17. Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937) – inventor of radio
  18. Peter Robertson (1879-1951) – inventor of square-socket drive for screws
  19. Alfred Scard- Fictional character
  20. James Watt (1736-1819) – engineer, greatly improved steam engines

(6 out of the 20 are Canadians (Banting, Best, Bondar, Dow, Fleming and Robertson).

• Brain hides Stephen Hawking in a knothole, which he calls a black hole. One of Hawking's discoveries was that black holes emit radiation.
• Hippocampus is Greek for seahorse. The brain's hippocampus is shaped like one. Hippopotamus is Greek for river horse.
• Isaac Newton's Arithmetica Universalis is a mathematics text first published in 1707.

Gallery

Main article: Brain's Brain/Gallery