| “ | Did you hear that? She just said my name! Roar-ley! | ” |
"Zoo or False?" is the twenty-first episode of the first season of The Replacements.
Summary[]
Riley replaces the zookeeper with an eco-warrior, who promptly frees the animals.
Plot[]
The family visits Amalgamated Zoo Corp. Gardens, a run-down zoo where the animals are treated like prisoners. The creatures are stuffed in tiny cages, and some exhibits place natural enemies in the same cage. To Riley, it feels as if it gets worse each time they visit.
Riley stops by her favorite exhibit, a panther named Sasha, whom Riley dotes on. Riley confronts the zookeeper, named Hiram Smeck, and requests better living conditions for the animals. As the underpaid zookeeper feeds the animals gray slop, he says it would be too expensive to make the cages look like the animals' natural habitats. Additionally, the zoo is so underfunded that the animal food is also his lunch.
It is obvious that Riley is the only person in her family disgusted by the zoo's conditions. Riley calls Fleemco to replace the zookeeper with someone who cares about animals. Hiram gets a job at a mall petting zoo. Meanwhile, an eco-warrior chains herself to a tree to stop a forest from being bulldozed. The Fleemco crew deliver her an invitation, then they chain themselves to the tree.
One month later, the Darings attend the grand reopening of Amalgamated Zoo Corp. Gardens, now led by the eco-warrior. She launches into an impassioned rant about how the zoo's parent company wouldn't let her improve the animals' living conditions. The activist's speech excites Riley so much, she says that animals should be free. At the end of the eco-warrior's speech, she pulls a switch literally freeing the animals from their cages. Agent K lassos the eco-warrior and throws her into a cage, but it is too late; the animals escape the zoo and wreak havoc on Pleasant Hills.
Riley encounters Sasha hanging onto a telephone pole. She tries to talk Sasha down, but the panther jumps to maul her. Agent K traps Sasha in a cage, and she makes it clear to Riley that Sasha is a wild animal. As Riley realizes that she replaced the wrong person, she sees an ad on a passing bus that has the zoo's owner on it. Riley hatches a plan to round up the escaped animals and bring them to the owner.
It takes the Darings all day to catch the animals. C.A.R. airlifts them to the Amalgamated Zoo Corp. corporate headquarters. The zoo animals surround the owner in his office. The owner admits that the zoo is at capacity, but he claims that further expansion is impossible. Todd comes up with the idea to turn the owner's golf course into a nature preserve.
Another month later, the animals frolic at the new nature preserve. At Dick's insistence, the golf course remains open.
Trivia[]
- When Todd gets carried away by monkeys, he says, "Get your stinkin' paws off me, you darn dirty apes!", a bowdlerized quote from the 1968 film Planet of the Apes.