The Hamster & Gretel sees an honorary member added to their crime-fighting team, while also taking on a super villain with a pretty useless skill of her own.
A series of bank robberies take place throughout the city, and Fred and Kevin find out through many of the moves the perpetrators use that they are cheerleaders. Too bad their skirts also reveal their color scheme, and they can be traced back to students in their high school. That was easy enough. And luckily there are cheer tryouts tomorrow, so Fred is sent undercover to join the cheer team to gather more evidence.
Turns out Fred used to be a cheerleader and was really into it, until she was told to smile, in which case she stopped. Kevin also takes the opportunity to spend some more time with his lover, Hiromi and goes shopping for an outfit while Gretel and Fred dive deep into their favorite anime at home, Yuko Cheerleading Warrior Attack.
It’s time for the cheerleading tryouts and the coach sounds a lot like Community Sue from Big City Greens. Fred auditions and amazes everyone with her skills, including a physics professor who also explains everything to Kevin. She’s in and has to learn a super complicated routine tomorrow afternoon, which will give her a chance to quiz all the other cheerleaders about their interests… in crime.
Fred, Hamster and Gretel go through the locker room lockers as the coach and the rest of the cheerleaders enter. They hide in a nearby office where they can still see everything and discover that the coach’s whistle is a hypnotic device and plan to take over the entire city.
The porridge rally is taken over and the crowd is hypnotized. Fortunately, Fred finds her flute patent very easily and discovers his only weakness… The hypnotic power is nullified by loud rhythmic music. Cue the musical number of the episode.
The town is saved during the catchy tune and Fred has made friends with the cheerleaders by rescuing them but cheerleading is not for her but she would go all the way down to watch anime together sometime. A pleasant message about stereotyping in the public school system.
Kevin and Gretel are running errands for their mom, which is a chore when you consider how their mom articulates what she wants. Of course, the search for “The Perfect Onion” leads to an encounter with a super villain – who introduces himself through song.
Her backstory – she was a telenovela star who was written off her show for not being able to cry on command so she tried many different onion treatments until one day a light from the sky gave her the power to talk to onions and now she will they do make the whole world cry. Her name: Camilla Cebolla.
It’s a great musical number – but only generates laughter from Gretel and Kevin. They both begin to mock other products in the store, but Camilla clarifies that the onions also LISTEN to her and form a rolling pedestal on which she is carried away. Although no real crime was committed, the duo must now also chase her to get the onion they need for their mother’s soup.
They meet up with Camilla again and this time it’s a little more serious – her onion booster needs power and the only way to recharge it is to use a superhero’s powers. She catches Gretel and knocks Hamster out with her super onion breathing. Knowing that his mother is the guardian of the remedies, getting a cure for bad onion breath from her, which may or may not involve revealing a deep, dark secret in a cup.
Gretel is still trapped and the onions of the world are summoned by the onion booster, with the plan to burst them all at once to drown the people of the world in their own tears. She calls the onions her underlings, though she’s never asked them what they think of her plan. We already know they listen to her, and now they don’t like what they hear and retreat to the fields, crops and burgers they came from.
Hamster and Gretel are ready to head back to dinner, but Kevin dwells on her origin story. Forces that came from the sky. Sounds a bit familiar, doesn’t it?
We see the alien ship and the voices from within hover from the first episode and say their experiment had been a failure, and that talking to onions as a superpower wasn’t a winner.
This episode of Hamster & Gretel is now available on Disney Channel, the DisneyNOW app, and Disney+.
