Plot: Jake battles a mysterious creature in the sewer and comes out supposedly victorious. However, Jake is more preoccupied with the upcoming Fall Dance than he is with his normal dragon duties.
The next day, he gets up the courage to ask his crush, Rose, to the dance but finds she already has a date with the resident blockhead jock, Brad. In order to save face, Jake lies and says he also already has a date to the dance, so it’s a race to find a date before it’s too late. Jake tries to ask nearly every available girl he can find, but he has a big problem. His breath is horrible. Despite many efforts to freshen it up, the stink eventually gets so bad that they actually evacuate the school to find the source.
Grandpa says his horrible breath is perfectly natural for a dragon his age. His firebreathing glands are reaching maturity, and the bad breath problem should clear up in a week or so. Jake can’t wait that long with the dance coming up, but Grandpa is more concerned over the creature they battled earlier.
Fu Dog, always one to offer a suggestion, brews up a potion. As long as Jake wears the concoction in a small flask around his neck, his bad breath will be gone. Jake’s ecstatic to be minty fresh again, but is still dateless. Having asked out every free girl at his school. Fu takes him to the magical realm to ask out a nice supernatural girl.
Jake’s put off by Fu’s first choice, a half-girl half-spider, but is quickly enamored by a pair of twins nearby. Fu explains that they’re oracles. Not only that, but they see different things in the future. Sara, a bright and cheery girl, can only see negative events while Kara, a gloomy punk girl, can only see the positive events. Despite liking how they look, Jake can’t handle their sudden blurting of predictions, so he moves on.
Jake sets his sights on a beautiful girl at the potions counter named Jasmine, but before Fu can offer his two cents, he gets grabbed by two thugs he owes money to. Jake is able to make a date with Jasmine, despite her incredibly precise curfew, and he saves Fu from the thugs.
Jasmine and Jake head to the dance while Grandpa stumbles upon pictures that Jake’s mom took of him and Jasmine before he left. Seeing her red eyes in all of the photos yet none show Jake’s eyes as red, he deduces that she is a Nix, a creature that is perfectly normal and harmless during the day but becomes a soul-sucking demon at night when the moon reaches the center of the sky.
Jake flaunts Jasmine to Rose and Brad and his classmates. Everyone’s so impressed with Jasmine’s looks, that Jake takes advantage of the attention and starts taking over the dance, leading everyone in rapping and DJ-ing. Everyone’s having a good time, but Jasmine notices the position of the moon and asks Jake to leave. He says they’ll go soon, but he wants to stay for a while longer. Realizing Jake won’t go, Jasmine tries to leave on her own, only to be stopped by Brad who also ignores her requests to leave so he can pressure her into a dance.
Jasmine starts her transformation and steals the souls of Brad and several other boys, turning them into mindless zombies. Once the moon is precisely in the center of the sky, Jasmine finishes her transformation into a full Nix, quickly sucking up the remaining souls in the room. Jake calls Fu, admits to what he did, and Fu starts whipping up a potion to combat Jasmine while Jake stalls her in his dragon form.
Jake struggles with Jasmine, but is soon saved by Dragon!Grandpa and Fu, who also give him a potion to help him beat the Nix. As Grandpa stalls Jasmine some more, Jake downs the potion without thinking and Fu reveals that was actually a potion which strips you of your powers temporarily and he was meant to pour it on Jasmine.
Jake, now dragon-less and with Grandpa quickly zombified, starts getting pummeled by Jasmine until he gets the idea to use the one piece of his dragon nature he has left – his horrible breath. He rips off his necklace and breathes right in Jasmine’s face, throwing her for a loop and knocking her out cold, releasing the consumed souls back to their rightful owners.
Fu and Grandpa take a now un-transformed Jasmine to the shop where she’ll be contained until sunrise and then sent back home. Jake tries to skew the attention of the confused students back to his DJ-ing, but without the necklace everyone soon starts dispersing at the smell. Jake starts to leave when he’s stopped by Rose who thanks him for the dance. They state that they both came to the dance with the wrong person and promise to make better choices in the future.
After a pratfall, Jake returns Jasmine back home with them exchanging apologies, and it’s revealed that Trixie and Spud accidentally switched bodies when their souls were returned.
Breakdown:
– Jake was seriously going to ask out the school janitor? She has to be in her 50s. I know the joke is haha, she’s ugly and gross so it shows how desperate Jake is to get a date, but, still, major creepiness factor for even suggesting this as an option, especially when he does actually try to hit on her.
– The main point of this bad breath part of the episode is trying to meld something akin to an embarrassing result of puberty with something dragon-like, so we can have a cliché teen problem episode still tied into the main plot. But I gotta say, having the problem be bad breath….uh, that’s still pretty normal. You could easily change that to body odor and nothing would change. Since the issue was with his firebreathing glands, maybe he could spontaneously spout fire? Dangerous? Yes. But being in a cartoon universe could easily dispel the gigantic risks and just make for comical burns.
– Jake seriously got a girl to pay an iota of attention to him after using the line “You come here often?”? This really is a fantasy world.
– Why is Jake lying to Fu about getting a date? He just says ‘I’ll be fine’ not ‘don’t worry, I got a date!’ The only reason I can see for this is that if Jake told Fu he got a date, he’d have to tell him her name or point her out to him, which is obviously something they’re trying to avoid. It’s already obvious that there’s something very wrong with Jasmine both by Fu’s warning beforehand that some of the girls in that part of town were dangerous, with the sudden shift in tone when she conveys her curfew and, of course, the obvious shot of her shifting her eyes as they glow red.
It’s like they’re purposely writing this part incredibly poorly for the sake of moving the plot along.
– Let’s just get this out of the way, many people, particularly Jake, are being complete assholes in this episode, and Jasmine is being treated like a piece of meat. Not only does Jake refer to her as ‘My Hot Date, Jasmine.’ but he also completely ignores her requests to leave by her established curfew time, ignores her saying she doesn’t feel well, every guy in the dance clamors around her and, for some reason, treats Jake like a king because he got a hot date, which is weird because everyone else, barring Brad, starts ignoring her after Jake starts showboating with his rap skills.
Then Brad ignores her saying she has to leave because she doesn’t feel well so he can pressure her into a dance. To top it all off, when people finally start shifting attention back to Jasmine, Jake and Trixie basically call her a cheating hoe for dancing with Brad (even though this dance doesn’t even involve touching each other. Plus, Jake is way too busy being a showboating DJ to pay his date an ounce of attention. I’d say she has a right to dance with someone else at this point.). Jake doesn’t even care about this anyway because, with Brad preoccupied, Rose is free for him to pounce on. And hey, as a bonus, she’s on the rebound after being dumped by Brad to dance with the ‘prettiest girl in the room’
– *Jasmine in full Nix form* Jake – “Oh now you want to dance with me?” Uhhhhhh, you never asked her if she wanted to dance or even implied it. The instant you got her through the doors you were flaunting her around to your friends, then to Rose and Brad, then the other students. The only other reason I can think of for this line is her dancing with Brad, but, again, he didn’t give a crap about that other than giving him an opportunity to dance with Rose.
– Of course Jake uses the potion on himself before asking 1) what it does and 2) what he needs to do with it.
– So as long as Rose is within stank distance, Jake’s visibly green nasty breath doesn’t come out? How convenient.
– Any reason Jake can’t fish the necklace out of the garbage and continue the dance? It’s not like it broke or anything. Any reason he chucked it in the garbage at all, for that matter? He really only needed to take it off his neck or even drop it to the floor.
– I will give props to the ending for acknowledging that Jake was being an ass, but not entirely because 1) They clearly put more of the blame on Jasmine, even if, admittedly, she should’ve told Jake what she was (to be fair, it must be hard to get dates if you explain that you turn into a soul-sucking she-beast when the moon is in the center of the sky. Cinderella this is not.) and 2) He only apologizes for not leaving when she asked. He doesn’t apologize for only asking her out for the sake of making Rose jealous, or flaunting his ‘hot date’ in front of his classmates like she was the aforementioned piece of meat, or thinking badly of her for dancing with Brad when it wasn’t her choice.
– Also, why is Jake now free of bad breath while walking Jasmine home? You can’t make rules for bad breath.
————————————-
This is a pretty bad episode. Not horrible, but still bad. The action isn’t that good, the running gag about his breath is just dumb, and you can see it coming from a mile away that he’ll use his bad breath to beat Jasmine. After all, if he didn’t, that would mean the breath thing would just be a plot device for the sake of getting Jake to date Jasmine, and there are much less contrived ways of doing that. Maybe it was so close to the dance that every other girl had a date so he had to go to the magical realm to get one?
Speaking of the ending, that was an incredibly stupid way of beating her. If his breath is bad enough to knock out a Nix, surely it’s bad enough to possibly kill people. Or at least make them physically ill. It’s like his breath had a worse effect on her than it did regular humans.
I can’t believe I’m bringing this up, but this ending was much in the same vein as Naruto beating Kiba by farting in his face. And I really can’t believe I’m saying this, but whereas the Naruto thing was stupider, at least it was more of a surprise and kinda funny in a ‘hurr hurr farts’ way. This was entirely predictable from start to finish, made even more predictable right before the finale due to Jake losing his powers. By the way, apparently Jake’s bad breath problem doesn’t exist in his dragon form, even though it’s caused by his dragon form. Figure that out.
Not to mention how much of this story either doesn’t make sense, was badly written for the sake of convenience, or wrote Jasmine into being purely an object. They downplay Jake’s level of fault here at the end by a lot. I’m almost convinced the ending where he walks her home and makes that weak apology was merely thrown in when test audiences complained about how Jasmine was being treated for the whole episode. I’m surprised Jasmine wasn’t more angry at him bragging about his ‘hot date’ to everyone then ditching her to enjoy the limelight. I know she had more pressing matters to attend to, but I’d still be pretty mad.
Jake’s also terribly stupid in this episode, moreso than usual. He asks out a girl in the magical realm without asking what exactly makes her magical even after Fu warns him about the girls in the market, and the previous girls he met all had some weird issue that he couldn’t deal with – two of them being seemingly normal looking girls with powers that annoyed him. Then lying about it to Fu for no reason, drinking the potion without asking what it did or how to use it (hell, that could’ve been a poison for all he knew). I know Jake’s not the smartest person in the world, but this is overkill for the sake of plot convenience.
Even Trixie and Spud don’t escape stupidity and asshole-ism. Their role in this episode is to convey information to Jake that he would’ve discovered seconds later anyway and to just be there. Trixie is taking it upon herself to ‘perform charity work’ by taking Spud to the dance so no other unfortunate girl will have to suffer through being his date. That’s almost exactly what she says. With Spud like ten feet in front of her. Not like any girl who agrees to date Spud won’t be aware of what she’s getting into. Spud really wears his personality on his sleeve. If you agree to something along the lines of;
“Hey, uh, pretty girl. Would you, uh, like to go dancing at the dance with me at the, uh, dance. We can totally wear matching shirts.”
Then you can’t say you didn’t think he was a stoner-esque doofus when you’re at the dance.
This also could’ve been made a lot better with just a small tweak. Spud can’t get a date to the dance because he completely forgot to ask anyone until it was too late so Trixie takes it as a ‘charity case’ to be his date, perhaps also covering up that she didn’t have a date. There, was that so hard?
Then, at the dance, Trixie doesn’t want to dance or do anything. She lays down ground rules at the start that she won’t dance, get him punch or take pictures with him. She just sits at the table being miserable while Spud is forced to stay with her also doing nothing at the table because I guess he doesn’t want to abandon his date no matter how much of a bitch she’s being. Then they switch bodies at the end because…..we needed to end on a joke. Really makes you wonder why they even went at all.
Ya know what? I change my mind. This is a horrible episode. Maybe not insultingly horrible, but still terribly written, uninteresting and just not fun. Not to mention there’s an influx of cocky!Jake during this episode with even more painful slang to sit through. Yes, I realize how old I seem typing that.
Next Episode, Spud enters a talent show where the trophy is an important supernatural artifact that Jake needs to recover.
If you enjoy my work and would like to help support my blog, please consider donating at my Ko-Fi page. Thank you! ♥
The Anime Madhouse 