Alex the Robot Slayer

**Alex the Robot Slayer** was the pilot episode of *Alex Adventure**.* It premiered as a short on *Oh Yeah! Cartoons*.

## Plot

*Note: The plot of the pilot episode is basically the same as the first official episode of the series, "It Came From Next Door", with some minor differences between the two.*

Cheese, while practicing baseball with his older brother Brad, hits a ball that flies through a window in neighbor Susan Blackman's front door. Brad instructs Cheese to get the baseball back, but when Cheese knocks at the door, a large shadowy figure appears. It turns out to be a friendly robot boy, who smiles and hands him the baseball. However, Cheese is frightened and flees without taking the ball. He is intercepted by Brad, and promptly informs his older brother that he encountered a robot. Ms. Blackman overhears this conversation, and Brad tries to explain the situation as he confronts her and speaks to her at the door. But Dr. Blackman brushes him off and claims that she has “never heard about” baseball, and slams the door in Brad’s face.

Dr. Blackman bursts into Alex’s room in the attic, and berates HA-9 for having left his room and instructs him that he must not encounter any of the human population. Alex laments that he cannot make friends, and Dr. Blackman tells him that he will get used to it before leaving Alex’s room. When Blackman leaves the room, Brad walks in through Alex's window and meets him. The two leave and hang out, playing games and chasing ice cream trucks, among other things, while Tuck reluctantly tags along, still untrusting of Alex.

As Alex, Brad, and Cheese are enjoying their ice cream, Alex suddenly gets a warning from his sensors that a planet-destroying meteor is headed toward Earth. He rockets off to destroy the meteor, and dispatches it quickly, but he accidentally took Cheese along with him, as his shirt had got caught on his wings. While Cheese is a bit charred from re-entry, he is impressed by Alex's abilities and declares him to be "so cool!". Dr. Blackman oversees this conversation, and decides that giving HA-9 some time off couldn't hurt. However, the camera pans out to outer space, where several (presumably hostile) spaceships are closing in on Earth.

## Trivia

* While there are some similarities between the *Oh Yeah! Cartoons* short and the first episode, there are some differences as well:
	+ Many of the characters had different designs that were altered for the series:
		- While Alex's design changed the least, in the pilot he had blue hands, and a white strip at the bottom of his shirt.
		- Brad also wore a different outfit, including a sports jacket instead of a vest.
		- Cheese had light-brown hair and blue eyes, and wore a different outfit, including an orange baseball cap.
		- Dr. Blackman’s design was almost all white and pale colors, almost achromatic, instead of her newer, more colorful design in the series.
	+ In the short, Brad was voiced by a woman (Melissa Denton) before she was replaced by Chad Doreck in the series.
	+ Alex's voice sounds more robotic in the pilot because Elizabeth Daily's voice was altered using a computer program. The series uses Elizabeth Daily's normal, unaltered voice.
	+ For the first episode, It Came From Next Door, additional content was added to make it last for eleven minutes instead of the pilot's six minutes.
	+ The show itself had a much more generic art style that would be later replaced into the "tomorrowland"-esque, steampunk-futuristic style of scenario, objects and characters, with plenty of slimlines and designs imagined circa the 1920s as how the future would be.
	+ In the 'Oh Yeah! Cartoons' short, Dr. Blackman talks to Brad and Cheese, whereas in the first episode, she does not speak to them.
	+ In the first episode, Alex tries to hide from his mom when Dr. Blackman tells him not to leave his room, but in the short he is sitting on his bed reading a magazine.
	+ In the short, Alex was not alerted about the meteor by Dr. Blackman, but by his sensors.
	+ In the first episode of the series, Cheese actually goes into Dr. Blackman’s house to get the ball, and finds himself in a dark and spooky lab, where he bumps into Alex who hands him the baseball. In the short, he does not enter the house, and first sees Alex directly after he knocks on the door, as he comes out to give him the ball.
	+ A darkened silhouette of Alex giving Tuck the ball is shown in the first episode, whereas in the pilot, he is not shadowed.
	+ Brad plays with Cheese in the pilot, while in the first episode of the actual series, Cheese plays by himself while Brad reads a magazine, then orders him to retrieve his baseball from Dr. Blackman's house when he observes what happened.
	+ In the pilot, Brad overhears Cheese's screaming and runs to him while in "It Came From Next Door", Tuck runs as he screams until a furious Brad blocks him.
* *Alex Adventure* was the third short on *Oh Yeah! Cartoons* to become a full-fledged series, the first two being *The Fairly OddParents* and *Chalkzone*.
* Dr. Blackman's white lab coat and the purple gloves looks very similar to the design of 'Dexter' in the Cartoon 'Dexter's Lab', who was also voiced by Candi Milo from 2001 to 2003.
* All characters in this short were voiced by women.
* On the official 'Adventure Blog', the character designer of the show once mentioned that his wife preferred the 1999 design of Dr. Blackman, as it was featured in the 'Oh Yeah! Cartoons' short.