"Win, Lose and Kaboom!" (also known as "Jimmy Neutron: Win, Lose and Kaboom", and as "Jimmy Neutron: You Bet Your Life Form" as a working title) is a special hour-and-a-half-length television film from the The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, and the second installment to the Jimmy Neutron film series. It is also the show's 36th aired and 38th overall production episode, as well as the premiere episode of the show's third season.
Plot[]
Mysterious space rocks are falling onto several different planets. One falls on Earth, and Jimmy feels the need to investigate it, whereas Cindy feels no one should mess with it, as they learned from the Yolkian incident not to talk to intergalactic strangers.
When the rock is taken to Retroville's school, the mayor asked what they should do with it. Most agree on destroying it, but Jimmy shows up in time and explains the history of the rock. Since 1511, rocks with strange symbols have fallen from the skies. Every rock that landed on Earth over the last 500 years was destroyed before science had a chance to studying them. Although initially complied with the idea of studying the rock, the town instead votes (with Cindy's encouragement) to make the stone into a tourist attraction after being reminded of Jimmy's mistake of talking to intergalactic strangers.
Jimmy knows a message is on the rock and he wants to decode it. However, General Abercrombie takes it away. Fortunately, Jimmy pulls his dog's tail and shoots a locating device. Soon, Jimmy, Cindy, Sheen, Carl, Goddard, and Libby sneak into the military base to get it back. When they get in, they are surprised to see Bolbi, and give up on how he got inside.
Once Jimmy decodes the message and answers its riddle (in the dark they arrive without being fetched; in the light, they are lost without being stolen), he and his friends are abducted and forced to play a life-threatening game show, Intergalactic Showdown, hosted by the evil Meldar Prime, who threatens to blow up the losing planets.
Their first opponents are the Gorlocks. Jimmy forms a secret alliance with one, named April, and the two plan to end the game show and save the planets. They become friends and appear to develop some feelings for each other as they meet in secret to plot their attack.
Throughout the first two events, Jimmy feels like he can single-handedly win them without allowing his friends to help, so he causes his teammates to lose them, thus almost getting the Earth destroyed by Meldar and forcing the gang to vote off somebody. At their Survivor-like tribal council, Jimmy feels useless since he caused the others to lose both games. Jimmy, Cindy, and Bolbi become tied with votes. In the end, Bolbi is eliminated in a 2-2-3 vote. They are surprised to see that Bolbi voted himself out. As a result, Bolbi is kept in the Cell of Indignity (which turned out to be dignity) until the end of the game.
The gang next competes with the Needleheads in an eating competition. One of the Needleheads gets his head blown up after eating a banana creme pie. Jimmy wants to go for his team, confident he can get the wheel to stop on banana creme pie again, but the others convince him to send Carl because he can stomach anything. Carl gets an alien dish and actually likes it. Team Earth wins.
After the event, April and Jimmy meet and Jimmy decides to help April stop Meldar from destroying all the planets. April then kisses Jimmy, which is a sign of trust in her culture, which of course Cindy misinterprets this as making out and gets jealous. She prepares to start a fight, but they are interrupted by April’s father.
The next game is a race against the Brains, who lure them into a hypnosis. Goddard is disqualified from the race, as Meldar forbids the teams to cheat (even though he lets the Brains do it). The gang runs and they see a short cut sign. which leads to the finish line. Cindy asks why there would be a clearly labeled shortcut, but Jimmy dismisses her and says to trust him. They foolishly run to the shortcut, and they are instantly zapped back into their hometown.... or so they think. In actuality, they are sent into Dream State Retroville.
In the hypnosis, as they are sent back to their city, everything in Retroville is different and unusual. They notice that Bolbi and Goddard are still missing from the team and all the people are missing in Retroville. Things get from bad to worse. The street signs in the city are all blank. There are no clouds in the sky whatsoever. The moon had several unusual striped colors around its surface, which Jimmy denotes it as a meteorological impossibility. They hear voices that are haunted and strange in the Candy Bar, which are the voices of their parents calling their children's names. They run to the Candy Bar and no one was inside. Their parents emerged behind the counter of the store. Their parents’ eyes are not in a usual place; their eyes are in a position that defies the optical structure of the human eye; their eyes are all delirious and wild. They are starting to chant this word: "eat and forget". As Sam serves the ice-cream to Carl and Sheen, Libby complains that the ice cream tastes like sheetrock (Not to be confused with drywall sheets) and Carl eventually eats it. Their parents walk slowly like zombies, continue chanting the same "eat and forget" line and they run.
As they leave the Candy Bar, everything was now devoid of the parts of the city except the Candy Bar. They have no choice but to leap in the chasm to escape the hypnosis. After escaping the hypnosis, the kids see that the Brains are about to win, but Jimmy realizes that they can still win if they help each other out and finally decides to be a team player. The kids work together and win the race.
Jimmy and the gang are then tied for the lead with the Gorlocks, in a Trivia Showdown and Meldar gives Goddard back to Jimmy. Papa Gorlock beats Jimmy to smashing the Gong of Trivia but answers the question incorrectly. Then Jimmy is up, and out of the blue, Hugh falls into the scene, and having watched so much alien TV, becomes the team's lifeline and answers Jimmy's question for him. This causes Jimmy's team to win the new space-car and the Earth to be salvaged. Unfortunately, the other planets are going to be blown up and the losing teams are being forced to watch.
Not wanting to break his promise to April, Jimmy still refuses to let Meldar blow up the other planets, so he and his friends decide to do the right thing and end Meldar's show forever. After using Goddard to interfere with Meldar's technology, Jimmy's space car shoots a blue missile at Meldar, seemingly crushing him, but he returns momentarily and summons an army of robots, two Flargi, and Vandanna to prevent them from doing anything to his show. Meldar transforms Vandanna into a fierce fighting machine. In this form, Jimmy is able to use Goddard to interfere with her positronic brain and get her to fight Meldar. Vandanna then knocks his head off. All the races team up and defeat Meldar's robots and one of the Flargi (the other was tamed by Carl). Eventually, Meldar retrieves his head, defeats and fires Vandana, and is about to use his generators to kill Jimmy. But Carl throws a pie in his face and steals his Matrix Generators, which leads to Jimmy threatening to blow up the sector with them unless Meldar gives up his horrible game show and lets the Brains take over the entertainment. Meldar gives into Jimmy's demands, and Jimmy gives April the generators. April then gives Jimmy another kiss, making Cindy angry once again. Our heroes return home safe, and sound and the planets are saved forever.
The next day, another space rock falls down to the Candy Bar with a message from April and Cindy angrily leaves and the episode ends.
Official art for the episode
Home video releases[]
- DVD
- The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius: The Complete Series
Trivia[]
- The Space Bandits, the Junkman, the Lima Beans, the germs, Bonzilla, Gortox the Irritable and some Yolkians can be seen in the audience.
- This was the sixth special episode of The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius overall.
- This episode was also mistakenly classified as the final episode of season 2 of The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius.