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The Wizbits, Episode 207
Aired 22 October 2000
The Wizbits stumble across a tribe of Grottolings, who have built large machines to chop down entire forests so they can harvest the wood and use it for buildings and for constructing furniture. However, this has the end result of draining some of the inherent magic away from the land, so the Wizbits protest loudly to the Grottolings. Doodle, the new Wizbit, challenges the greedy Grottoling Shaman, Greenback Gastruck, to a race. Gastruck constructs a very large and very fast racecar, which Doodle ridicules through a series of crude sketches. Completely stripped of self-esteem, Gastruck loses handily to the Wizbits. As a result of his loss, he agrees to cease the destruction of the forest and disband his grottoling corporation.
Doodle: Sometimes, the best way to utterly annihilate someone is to hit them where they're weakest: their emotions. Manipulating the minds of others can get you all sorts of great stuff!
One of the few episodes where the animation was almost completely newly commissioned, rather than re-used from the original Japanese ElamenSTAR cartoon, due to the prominence of Doodle, a new character which briefly replaced Skip with no explanation in the American series. Perhaps as an effort to sell the character to the viewers, this episode was largely rewritten to focus primarily on Doodle and how "cool" Doodle is. The original episode in Japanese is named "The Sound of Ondori" (see the ElamenSTAR Episode Guide) and bears only a very slight resemblance to its American counterpart.
Some significant rewrites to the original plot include an overly preachy lesson on the value of preserving the environment. The Grottolings themselves, which are portrayed as "evil" (they were never attributed as such in the book, where they were never any more than a slight nuisance and rather stupid), also appear to occur hundreds of miles away from their native home of the Mist Sea; this too was never explained.
Missing the point entirely, Greenback Gastruck has been adopted by the oil industry as a sort of "unofficial mascot."
Greenback Gastruck .... Rocky Carroll
Geardt .... Eric Cummings
Gastria .... Sheri Maple
Grottoling Child .... Nancy Cartwright
Huntsman Jim .... Gary Dubovsky