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"Employee of the Month" is the fifth episode of season four and the overall 44th episode of the Teen Titans series.

Plot[]

A UFO comes to a farm and attempts to snatch a cow when suddenly the Teen Titans burst out of their disguises and try to take it down. The UFO gets as far as the city center, where it mysteriously vanishes, leaving the Titans with no clue about its intentions and frustratingly marking this as the third time this week the thing's escaped without a trace. In addition, a new fast food joint named Mega Meaty Meat has opened up in the neighborhood, which does not suit Beast Boy at all because of his vegetarian disposition.

Besides, Beast Boy has to deal with a much more urgent problem: Since he has to rely solely on his own muscle power during high-speed pursuits (just like he had to in the UFO chase), he tires rapidly, so he wants to get motorized. His special object of desire is a moped, a Tidwell 3000, which he would like to adopt as the B-Ped. However, Robin refuses to spend any funds on buying one and Cyborg could not spare time to build one in light of their current mission, so Beast Boy follows Raven's advice to get a job and finance it by himself.

EOTM29

Beast Boy takes up a job at the Mega Meaty Meat

However, even the simplest jobs he tries as video game beta tester, a door-to-door salesman, and even a balloon animal clown (literally) blow up in Beast Boy's face, and in his desperation, he somehow finds his way into Mega Meaty Meat and its manager Bob, who is looking for hired help. At first abhorred by the prospect of having to handle meat products, Beast Boy is quickly swayed to stay and work in the place when Bob presents him with the prospective award for the Employee of the Month, namely Beast Boy's dream machine. The odd thing is that Beast Boy remains the only employee at the place, and Bob keeps a dark secret hidden in the back of his evermore popular restaurant...

To support their friend, the Titans have lunch at Mega Meaty Meat and can't help but wonder how Beast Boy can stand working at such a weird establishment even if it means good money. Beast Boy doesn't hesitate to tell them that its weirdness is just the tip the of the iceberg of his hatred towards it, but is willing to suck it up long enough to earn his beloved moped. However, before the Titans can dig in, Robin's communicator alerts them to the return of the UFO and they spring into action, sans Beast Boy from Cyborg and Raven since they know how much that moped means to him and abandoning his post would mean getting fired. An epic battle is waged in the city and the Titans manage to bring it down. But the UFO gives them an even harder nut to crack, since its sole occupant is a merely a cow. Starfire advises her friends to exercise extreme caution, citing the extreme formidability of the Cow People of Garlon Prime. However, Cyborg's ocular scanner confirms that what they're looking at is a normal Earth cow serving as not the UFO's pilot, but as the power supply! But before the Titans have time to think up a plausible theory, a whole horde of UFOs appears and attacks them.

Employee - Lunch!

Beast Boy using his most persuasive argument on the Source

Back at Mega Meaty Meat, Beast Boy is faced with a flood of hungry customers and a shortage of foodstuffs to serve them, so he goes into the back to get assistance. But once inside, he discovers that the restaurant is both a façade and the place of origin of all the UFOs: an alien conqueror made of living tofu, aka The Source, and his creations, the Bobs, are trying to catch as many cows as they can to provide power for their technology and using a weapon to blow up the Earth upon completion of the operation, just for fun. Determined not to let that happen, Beast Boy fights his way through a horde of Bobs, kidnaps the Source, and takes him back to Titans Tower to find out how to stop his insidious scheme. When the Source remains uncooperative, Beast Boy resorts to the most drastic means he can think of to make him talk - by covering him with sauce and threatening to eat him for lunch!

Employee - The End

The end of the Source

With the information the Source has given him on their weakness, which just turns out to be water, Beast Boy is able to single-handedly defeat the Newfu's plan, restore the cows and prevent the destruction of the Earth, by pressing a big button on the machine that shuts it down for good. But unfortunately, his shining hour goes without credit for him: the over-stressed B-Ped collapses into a scrap pile, and while explaining the rather bizarre circumstances to the others, it is discovered that Cyborg, in his ravenous appetite and to the horror of his friends, has inadvertently consumed the only key witness!

Characters[]

Main characters[]

Supporting characters[]

Villains[]

Trivia[]

  • The creators and crew of the series admitted on the fourth season's DVD that somehow their creative thinking just went overboard for this episode. Reasons provided by individual staff members include "Maybe we were tired" and "Tofu must have done something to Rob Hoegee in the past."
  • This episode reunites Rob Paulsen, Tom Kane, and Tara Strong, who voiced Brick, Professor Utonium, and Bubbles from the Powerpuff Girls, respectively.
  • Beast Boy uses Van Wyk BBQ Sauce - a reference to series storyboard artist, Adam Van Wyk. Likewise, the Tidwell-3000 owes its existence and name to storyboard artist Scooter Tidwell.
  • The magazine Beast Boy is reading is called "Hot Ride".
  • At the beginning of the episode, when Beast Boy is disguised as a pig, he is not green, like all his other transformations. Given that he was in a mud pit with the other pigs, though, it is possible that he simply coated himself in mud to hide his green skin.
  • Even Starfire shows a lack of enthusiasm for Beast Boy's love for a moped. In fact, she appears to be somewhat disturbed when Beast Boy says he is in love with "merely a land vehicle".
  • Running gag: Bob always addresses Beast Boy by other names (a total of 11 names).
  • This episode's title song is sung in Japanese.

Continuity[]

  • In the episode "Nevermore", Cyborg hated tofu when Beast Boy cooked it as replacement for eggs. But in this episode, he ate Newfu at the end. This could be due to the fact that the Source was covered in BBQ sauce and tasted like meat (being able to fool dozens of customers into thinking Mega Meaty Meat burgers were meat and not tofu, or rather, Newfu.)

Cultural references[]

  • Robin's new yellow glass visor helmet and bird like cape is a reference to the old Favicon Wikipedia Gatchaman anime.
  • The Source shares the same personality and mannerisms to Zim from Nickelodeon's Favicon Wikipedia Invader ZIM. However, they are not voiced by the same actor.
    • The Source was voiced by Rob Paulson.
    • Zim was voiced by Richard Steven Horvitz.
  • The opening of the Source's protective chamber is a spoof of the emergence of the cryogenic chamber in Favicon Wikipedia Akira.
  • Beast Boy's face while working as a clown looks like Chiro (super-hero mode) from Favicon Wikipedia Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go!, who is also voiced by Greg Cipes. The young girl asking for Beast Boy to make a balloon-animal monkey and walking away before Beast Boy turns into a monkey is another reference to the show. Also, Ciro Nieli, who is the creator of Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go! and the 2012 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, has worked on Teen Titans.
  • The background music that plays when Beast Boy rides his moped sounds similar to "Favicon Wikipedia Don't Fear the Reaper" by Blue Öyster Cult.
  • Bob's line "I like you, Danny" is a parody of Favicon Wikipedia Caddyshack.
  • The Scooter Beast Boy rides, as well as the scarf, helmet, and goggles he wears while riding, are a nod to the Japanese anime Favicon Wikipedia FLCL (Fooly Cooly) where the female protagonist Haruko Haruhara rides the same type of Moped and wears the same scarf, helmet, and goggles.

Goofs[]

  • As Beast Boy rides the moped out of Mega Meaty Meat, the restaurant sign on the doors was not seen.
  • Beast Boy threatened to have The Source for lunch, despite the scene showing nighttime.
  • The white on Robin's mask is black when he tells Beast Boy he can fly instead of needing a moped.

In popular culture[]

  • This episode is (so far) the only episode to have been remade in the new series Teen Titans Go!, titled Employee of the Month: Redux.
  • The main plot elements of this episode were replicated in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2012 CGI series episode "Pizza Face", with Greg Cipes reprising his role as the main protagonist in that episode (With the obvious exception of that being the archetypal episode in which the main character is rendered the only line of defense against a formidable force when nobody believes him and are wound up overtaken anyway instead of working for an establishment hiding a dark secret).

Gallery[]

Titans GO
Click here to view the gallery.

Transcript[]

ForReal37
Click here to view the episode transcript.

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