- “Tuck, you have to admit, for an evil cyborg robot, Jenny's pretty cool!”
- ―Brad
"It Came From Next Door" is the first segment of the first episode of My Life as a Teenage Robot. It is a remake of the series pilot, "My Neighbor was a Teenage Robot", which originally aired as the third segment of the 20th episode of Oh Yeah! Cartoons on December 4, 1999.
"It Came From Next Door" was produced in 2002 and premiered in Australia on October 18, 2002, the United Kingdom on November 3, 2002, Mexico on February 7, 2003, before reaching its home country of the United States on August 1, 2003.
Synopsis[]
Tuck Carbunkle, while practicing baseball, hits a ball that flies through a window in neighbor Nora Wakeman's front door. Tuck's older brother Brad instructs him to get the baseball back, but when Tuck knocks at the door, nobody arrives. He wanders inside, seeing various pieces of machinery and robot parts strewn about. When he reaches the baseball, it is handed to him by a shadowy, imposing figure. Tuck flees without taking the ball, where he is intercepted by Brad and informs Tuck that he encountered a "hideous bloodthirsty robot". Mrs. Wakeman overhears this conversation, and Brad tries to explain the situation, but Mrs. Wakeman does not respond. Brad tells Tuck that there's no robot in Mrs. Wakeman's house, but then he looks up and sees a robot in the window on the upper floor.
Jenny having caught Brad after he falls out her window.
Mrs. Wakeman walks back in her house and berates the robot, XJ-9, or Jenny as she wants to be called, for having left her room and instructs her that she must not encounter any of the human population. She instructs Jenny that there is a meteor warning, but Jenny disregards it, because the meteors typically burn up in the atmosphere. When Mrs. Wakeman leaves the room, Brad climbs into Jenny's window and meets Jenny. The two quickly become friends, and Jenny leaves her room to hang out with Brad, playing hackey sack and chasing ice cream trucks, among other things, while Tuck reluctantly tags along. However, the hackey sack which Jenny booted through the atmosphere became part of the meteor, meaning it is now planet destroyer class.
Jenny rockets off to destroy the meteor, and dispatches it quickly, but she accidentally took Tuck along, attached to her wings. While Tuck is a bit charred from re-entry, he is impressed by Jenny's abilities and declares her to be "so cool". Mrs. Wakeman oversees this conversation, and decides that giving XJ-9 some time off couldn't hurt. However, the camera pans out to outer space, where several (presumably hostile) spaceships are closing in on Earth.
Trivia[]
My Neighbor Was a Teenage Robot (1999)[]
- While there are some similarities between the Oh Yeah! Cartoons short and the first episode, there are some differences as well:
- Tuck's older design has a slighter older appearance than the newer one.
- Dr. Wakeman's look appears to be almost all white compared to the newer, more colorful one.
- Brad was voiced by Melissa Denton, who was replaced by Chad Doreck.
- All characters in this short were voiced by women.
- On the official Teenage Robot blog, the Teenage Roblog, Rob Renzetti posted that his wife preferred the original design of Dr. Wakeman featured here[1] and "hated the design" of Jenny in this short, which resulted in her design change in the original series, because "she reacted so strongly about Jenny that it made us reconsider our decision".
- Although this pilot premiered in the United States on December 4, 1999, it was actually produced in 1998 according to the credits.
It Came From Next Door (2002)[]
- One of the disassembled robots in Mrs. Wakeman's house looks suspiciously like Larry 3000 from Time Squad.
- There is a poster of a boy band in Jenny's room that resembles former boy band N*SYNC, titled SYNC'N.
- Similarly, Jenny has a poster of "Spitney" who is a parody of Britney Spears.
- The title is a reference to an often used sci-fi title "It Came From...", which may have begun with the film It Came from Outer Space.
- On the wall of monitors of various different cities, Beijing is listed as Peking. Peking is the pronunciation according to an earlier form of romanization of Chinese; the adaptation occurred in 1949. It is possible this is an intentional anachronism.
- On this wall, Burbank is also listed, which is the home of the Nicktoons Studios as well as Frederator's California branch.
- At one point in the episode, Tuck refers to Jenny as a "robot cyborg." While this may have been for comedic effect, or possibly to underline Tuck's initial fear and suspicion of Jenny, cyborgs are not the same things as robots. The term "cyborg" is short for "cybernetic organism." In order for Jenny to be a cyborg, she would need to be at least partially organic.
- Although this episode premiered in the United States on August 1, 2003, it was actually produced in 2002 according to the credits, as with every other season 1 episode.
- This episode was finished in July of 2002. [2]