Horrid Henry: Who Stole Mr Kill? (Horrid Henry)

"Horrid Henry: Who Stole Mr Kill?"
SPOILER ALERT: Mr. Kill wasn't stolen.
Series: Horrid Henry Part of Season: 1 Episode Number: 11 Air Date: 8 December 2006 Previous episode: Horrid Henry and the Bogey Babysitter Next episode: Horrid Henry Goes Swimming

Horrid Henry: Who Stole Mr Kill? is the eleventh episode in the first season of Horrid Henry, and the eleventh episode overall.

Plot

Mr Kill the teddy bear is missing, and Henry launches an investigation to find the kidnapper.

Why It Should Be Stolen

1. First off, Horrid Henry is being horrid (pun definitely intended) in this episode. When he notices Mr. Kill isn't in his room, he begins falsely accusing his family - and Moody Margaret - over stealing the teddy bear when they clearly didn't do it. In order, Henry does the following:
   • He assumes that his dad is cooking Mr. Kill for dinner, when the latter was actually roasting a chicken.
   • He invades Moody Margaret's garden and accuses her of burying Mr. Kill, despite the fact that she was only making a time capsule.
   • He uses force to get Perfect Peter to "confess" that he stole Mr. Kill, even though Peter didn't do anything wrong. Henry even goes as far as to use scissors to cut Peter's cello's strings!
   • Finally, he assumes that his Mum took Mr. Kill as a way of blackmailing Henry "to be good like Peter".
     • In fact, on the topic of Mum, she is also a hypocrite, as she didn't even inform Henry that she took Mr. Kill to be washed, making her the reason for the episode's events to begin with. It still doesn't exclude for Henry's awful behavior.
2. Three plot holes:
   • When Henry was in his fort, why didn't he notice Mr. Kill hanging out to dry?
   • Why didn't Mum just tell Henry that she washed Mr. Kill when he got home?
   • When Henry puts up the pictures of his suspects, it only showed Mum, Dad, and Peter, but after he confronts Margaret, her picture is already there.
3. While the animation is otherwise decent, it has several errors:
   • When Mum tells Henry to stay in his room for the rest of the day, her sleeves are blue - before that, they were purple.
   • When Mum explains that she washed Mr Kill because he was smelly, Henry is missing his yellow stripe on his shirt.
   • Henry and Peter have paler skin when the former is telling the latter to confess for Mum and Dad.
   • When Henry tells Peter to confess, the latter's room is no longer messy.
4. The animation also suffers a sharp drop in quality in several scenes, mostly during the scenes where Henry accuses Peter and goes into a montage of possible motives for Peter to steal the teddy bear. The drop in quality is shown through the character designs looking out of place with the background and looking like their character outlines were forcefully glued to the background.
5. Half-weak ending: While Henry is sent to his room for the rest of the day as punishment for his actions, he manages to retrieve Mr. Kill anyway despite Mum not letting him take the teddy with him. How is this a happy ending when Henry didn't even earn his teddy back?
6. The storyline as a whole is very poorly handled, as it attempts to paint Horrid Henry as the good guy when he is clearly the bad guy. Not to mention, Mum and Dad are treated as villains when they have a perfectly good reason to punish Henry.
7. In addition to being incredibly petty, Henry is extremely dumb in this episode as he actually confuses a chicken for Mr. Kill! Not to mention, he's too dumb to notice Mr. Kill on the washing line until Mum shows him.
   • Even worse, he immediately assumes that Margaret and her friend Sour Susan are burying Mr. Kill when they were really making a time capsule. How much dumber can he get?
8. The voice acting can be a tad annoying at times, since there is a good amount of yelling and screaming (even for the show's standards).
9. To top it all off, this episode only exists to pad out the first season since none of the events of it were ever mentioned in subsequent episodes - which, in turn, makes it a filler episode.

Redeeming Qualities

1. The idea of Horrid Henry becoming a detective for a day is a pretty good idea on paper, but it's sadly executed.
2. Mum, Dad, Perfect Peter, and Moody Margaret are likable in this episode and you feel sorry for how badly Henry treated them all. This is surprising since they can be quite unlikable to him a lot of the time.
   • On that note, the episode does succeed in getting you to sympathize with Peter considering how horrible Henry was to him.
3. Half-decent ending: Horrid Henry gets his comeuppance for his actions and is one of the few times where he deserved to be punished. He is sent to his room for the rest of the day and is told to pay for Perfect Peter's broken cello strings with his pocket money.
4. There are a few decent moments:
   • Depending on your view, the flashback scene of Perfect Peter being a sandcastle can be seen as somewhat funny.
   • Despite the weak ending, it is admittedly quite clever to see Horrid Henry using an arrow to retrieve Mr. Kill without leaving his bedroom.
   • The part where Mum and Dad catch Henry when he cuts Peter's cello strings, ask him what he did and Henry mistakes it for them asking Peter what he "did" is kind of funny, again, depending on your view.

Reception

This episode received negative reviews from fans of Horrid Henry, with the most criticism aimed at the titular character's antagonistic behavior - the storyline as a whole was also criticized for not being handled very well. As a result, "Who Stole Mr. Kill" is widely considered to be one of the worst episodes of Horrid Henry, as well as the worst episode of the show's first season.

Trivia

• This is the first episode that wasn't adapted from a story in the books.
• The animation style is a bit different than the previous episodes.

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