Mother Mae-Eye (episode)

Mother Mae-Eye
Episode Number	049
Broadcast Number	049
Season	04
Original Airdate	June 25, 2005
Production Code	257-503
Guest Characters	Jinx, Gizmo, Mammoth, See-More, Private H.I.V.E., and Mother Mae-Eye
Written by	David Slack
Directed by	Ben Jones
Chronology
Previous	"Overdrive"
Next	"The End - Part 1"

This is the page concerning the episode Mother Mae-Eye. For the character article, see Mother Mae-Eye.

"Mother Mae-Eye" is the tenth episode of season four and the overall 49th episode of the Teen Titans series.

Plot

The Titans wake up from sprawling around in the Tower's Ops room and are all hungry…for pie. Luckily, an obese but merry and kind old woman is there to serve them pie, care for them and spoil them like 6- to 9-year-old children. That woman, going by the name of Mother Mae-Eye, even turns the Tower into a giant gingerbread house and its environs into a veritable "candyland" with magic.

The Titans having pie

However, Mother can also be quite stern to her young charges, as the Titans find out when the H.I.V.E. Five raid the local mall. She smooths Robin's ("Robby-Wobby") wild hair and replaces his "dangerous toys" with baby stuff (diapers, toys and milk bottles), dresses Beast Boy ("Beastie-Boo") into a fluffy pink bunny pajama suit so he can't transform into animals, Raven ("Rae-Rae") into a frilly light yellow Shirley Temple dress (made from her blue cape and hood) and braided pigtails with girlish bow ties, Cyborg ("Borgy-Bear") into a raincoat, rain hat and galoshes, and Starfire ("Twinkle-Star") into an over sized Christmas-colored sweater before she lets them out to "play" (that is, fight the H.I.V.E. Five). These implements, however, hamper the Titans' fighting skills, and they all end up thrashed by the H.I.V.E. Five before Mae-Eye steps in and gives those "nasty children" a "good sound spanking".

During the fight, Starfire is trapped in one of See-More's eye bubbles, and as Mammoth, who was defeated by Mother Mae-Eye, is slammed into her, she hits a lamp, which breaks and gives her a solid knock on the head. But as she recovers, she sees Mae-Eye no longer as a kind old woman, but as a monstrous, green-skinned three-eyed hag. Back in the Tower, she discovers even worse things: Her friends are under a spell which prevents them from realizing the danger they're in, and Mae-Eye is actually feeding on the "love" they profess to her - and in order to get all of that "sweet nourishing affection", she intends to bake the Titans up in a giant pie while pretending to tuck them in for the night!

Mother's true face

Starfire of course protests vehemently, but is unable to fight Mae-Eye alone and quickly overpowered. Although Mae-Eye tries her best to get her under her control again, Starfire deceives her and comes to her friends' rescue. When the mind control proves too persistent and an army of gingerbread men created by the hag moves in on them, Starfire has no choice but to give the others a knock on the head as well, freeing them from the magic.

In a moment of quiet after a lengthy battle with the gingerbread army, the Titans muse over how Mae-Eye could have come into the Tower, and finally it turns out that she had smuggled herself in with a pie Cyborg had unwisely bought from an old witch that remarkably has the same appearance as Mother. Then Mae-Eye attacks them, pursuing them all over Titans Island. With no way to defeat her directly, Robin resorts to tricking her, and finally they manage to banish the hag back into her pie. And in order to pay them back for their latest defeat, Robin decides to grant the H.I.V.E. a gift of free pie...

Characters

Main Characters

• Robin
• Starfire
• Cyborg
• Beast Boy
• Raven

Villains

• Mother Mae-Eye (Debut)
  • Gingerbread Soldiers

• H.I.V.E. Five
  • Jinx
  • Gizmo
  • Mammoth
  • See-More
  • Private H.I.V.E.

Trivia

• The inspiration for this episode came after the creative team wanted a silly episode before The End three-parter episode but did not have the budget for a full-musical episode, which was the intention following the success of "Bunny Raven... or ...How to Make A Titananimal Disappear".
• Mother Mae-Eye's true form can be seen in mirrors throughout the episode.
• Mother Mae-Eye funnels her magic through a wooden spoon, much like a witch would use a wooden stick, like a wand.
• Innuendo: Starfire blushes and covers herself when See-More uses his see-through vision, meaning he possibly saw her naked.
• Profanity alert: When captured by Mother Mae Eye again, Robin promptly screams "Let us go, you crazy-!" right before Mother Mae Eye cuts him off. The unspoken word is clearly "b***h". This is notably the only time in the show that such a harsh curse word almost gets uttered by one of the main characters, especially by one of the heroes.
• When Mother Mae-Eye changes Robin's hair, she changes it to his classic Golden-Age hairstyle.
• Starfire's Mumbo alarm clock was in the oven with the Titans, before it melted.
• When Mother Mae-Eye is force feeding Starfire pie, Starfire spits it out and reveals yet another fascinating fact about Tamaranean biology: she has nine stomachs.
• This is one of the few episodes where Raven put on a big smile, though this was due to the fact she was mind controlled.
• Eating the cursed pie is evidently what unleashes Mother, so there is a way of disposing of it.
• Robin is supposed to be the most mature of the Titans, and pranking the H.I.V.E. Five is an out-of-character idea for him.
• This is the first time in the series that a remotely wacky episode has not had its opening theme song sung in Japanese.
• Once all of the Titans get freed from Mother's control, Robin seems to be the most irate over her actions, especially when Mother Mae Eye insists that the Titans call her Mother. Given what he went through with Slade during Season 1, Robin's very clear anger is very understandable.

Cultural references

• Part of the inspiration for the character of Mother Mae-Eye was Witchipoo, a character on H. R. Puffinstuff, played by Billie Hayes, which was why the creative team decided to seek her for the role.
• Early in the episode, Mother Mae-Eye declares that the Titans must be surrounded by "sugar, spice and everything nice", a reference to the nursery rhyme "What Are Little Boys Made Of?" as well as the opening narration to another Cartoon Network show The Powerpuff Girls.
• The monkey's paw in the gypsy's collection parodies the horror story The Monkey's Paw.
• During Cyborg's flashback to the witch who gave him the pie
  • The city of Kandor, the capital of Superman's home planet of Krypton, is seen on the counter next to her.
  • Control Freak's remote is seen on the counter next to her.
  • Puppet King (or at least, the lifeless puppet body that used to be the Puppet King) is also visible in this scene.
• Beast Boy's bunny outfit and the scene where Starfire has a bar of soap put in her mouth by Mother Mae-Eye are references to the movie, A Christmas Story.
  • Likewise, Raven's dress is similar to the kind that little girls like Shirley Temple used to wear from the 1930s to the 1950s.
• The way Mother Mae-Eye visually and mentally deceived the Titans is similar to the antagonists of the 1988 film They Live, where hideous blue-skinned aliens used disguises to look human, become the upper class and politicians, and used messages to order humans to submit to authority.

Goofs

• During the scene where the H.I.V.E. Five were raiding the mall, See-More puts on a visor in a close-up view. The scene then changes to a farther away view, and the visor is gone.
• When Mother Mae-Eye says "Goodness no! Too dangerous!" Her purse's strap is white for three frames.
• In the scene where Mother is putting the Titans to bed at 5 o'clock, when she is saying good night to each of the Titans, they appear to be tucked into individual pie tin-styled beds, but when she says "time for beddy-bye" before this occurs they are all in one large pie tin-styled bed.
• In the scene in which the Titans landed in another pie after being chased by Mother Mae-Eye, Starfire was flying next to Beast Boy through air using her flight abilities. But in the next shot, she is already in the pie, and Beast Boy is the last Titan to fall in.
• It is unknown how the Titans knew exactly where the H.I.V.E.'s base was when they delivered the prank pie, or why they didn't put through an anonymous tip to the police.
• After Mother Mae-Eye is sucked back into the pie and the Titans circle around it, we only see a close up of Robin, Beast Boy, Cyborg and Starfire Feet but in the next shot Raven's feet are shown along with the others after Robin got an idea for the pie.
• Starfire was under the control when Mae eye is in her disguise yet her eyes aren’t pink.
• In the scene where the Titans are covered by pie crust, Starfire's perspective shows that there is no pie crust layering them.

Gallery

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Transcript

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