"Arthur" Seasons 24 and 25 Trivia Quiz

Answer: Kevin Sampson

George volunteers to make a sculpture at a county art show. He struggles to come up with ideas. He asks his friends for ideas, but they all have a different opinion about what he should do. He makes a first attempt at a sculpture that has pieces of everyone's ideas. Carl says that he likes it, but he would prefer it if it was in the shape of a train. That sculpture gets taken away by the garbagemen who mistake it for trash. George bikes to the dump and calls Mr. Frensky to let him know. Mr. Frensky stops the garbagemen and rescues the sculpture, but it breaks right after it leaves the truck.

Someone is with Mr. Frensky at the dump. His name is Kevin Sampson and he is a sculptor. He shows George around the dump and says that it's a great place to get art supplies. He explains how trash can be turned into art supplies. Later on, George goes to a gallery by Kevin Sampson. Sampson gives George some more advice. He tells them that he turns himself into a bird so he can fly up and see his sculptures more closely. He also tells him not to worry about what his friends want and just be himself.

George goes to school and asks Mr. Morris for help getting art supplies from the school's trash. George gets plenty of art supplies and makes his sculpture. He calls it "The Friendship Train". When he unveils it at the art show, he tells each of his friends how they inspired different pieces of his sculpture. For some reason, he neglects to mention that Carl is the one who gave him the idea to make it a train. George's friends applaud, and so does Mr. Ratburn.

Answer: Uncle Slam

The original version of "The Great MacGrady" was banned because it has Lance Armstrong, who was convicted of using illegal substances. In season 24, this episode was remade. The main difference is that Lance Armstrong was taken out and replaced with a fictional wrestler in this universe, Uncle Slam. Uncle Slam's backstory is similar to Lance Armstrong's. They both had cancer, they both recovered, and they both won the biggest championship in their sport for seven years in a row, which had not been done before. Another thing they have in common is that Binky met them both, so he is the one who puts Francine in touch with Uncle Slam in the remake just like he was the one who put her in touch with Lance Armstrong in the original version.

The rest of the differences between the two versions are minor (different voices actors, different animation style, different title card, minor difference in a few lines of dialogue, and some characters who spoke in the original version do not speak in the remake). The storyline is the same. Take my quiz about season 13 to learn about that episode's storyline.

Aside from it being banned, there is a second reason this episode was re-made. It is a fan favorite episode. The other banned episodes (It's a No Brainer/The Shore Thing, Arthur Weighs in/The Law of the Jungle Gym, Binky vs. Binky/Operation D.W., Room to Ride/The Frensky Family Fiasco, and Falafelosophy/The Great Lint Rush) had not been remade when this quiz was made. Presumably, those are not fan favorites. It's a shame, because those are good episodes. What makes it an even bigger shame is that "The Shore Thing", "The Law of the Jungle Gym", "Operation D.W.", "The Frensky Family Fiasco", and "The Great Lint Rush" were not even controversial storylines and the only reason that they were banned is because they were paired with a banned storyline.

Answer: Buster and Mr. Ratburn

Actually, the end of this episode reveals that this was just Buster's dream and it didn't really happen. It was really fun to watch, though. The writers came up with something new and surprising in their 24th year on the job. That takes ingenuity.

Buster falls asleep in Mr. Ratburn's class. He has a dream in which the class is taking a test, Mr. Ratburn is in the teacher's lounge, and Buster's pencil breaks and the pencil sharpener in the classroom breaks. In the dream, Mr. Ratburn gives Buster permission to use the sharpener in the teacher's lounge. Buster inadvertently gets pencil shavings on the science teacher's science experiment. Buster and Mr. Ratburn touch it at the same time with the intention of getting rid of the pencil shaving and fixing the experiment. The electricity of the experiment goes through their bodies and causes the two of them to switch bodies. What follows is a very funny rest of the episode.

Answer: Buster

It's Take a Student to Work Day. Each kid goes to the workplace of a classmate's parent and learns about what their jobs are. In some cases, the kids help with the job for the day. Mr. Ratburn has each kid pick names (of who they will be working with) out of a hat. Binky goes to the newspaper and works with the chief editor, Bitzi Baxter (Buster's mother).

Binky finds the newspaper boring. There are no stories about bank robberies or anything that he is interested in. He asks the mayor a question about whether or not Main Street will become wheelchair-accessible (he says that his friend is Lydia although there was no episode that shows Binky and Lydia hanging out together when this quiz was made), but even the mayor's answer bores Binky. Harry Mills, the sportswriter and Bitzi's ex-boyfriend, takes Binky to the printer so that he can share a secret with him. Mills says that whenever he finds something boring, he pretends that it is a baseball game. When Binky tells him that he likes wrestling, Mills tells him that will work too.

Bitzi and Binky edit a story together. Binky is bored by the topic sentence. Bitzi asks him to come up with ideas to make it better and she says "Let's wrestle with it." Binky imagines it as if it's a wrestling match between a red pen and a boring sentence. The next day when Binky gives his report about this in class, he says that he and Bitzi worked on the topic sentence for 30 minutes. However, when they got done, it ended up being the topic sentence of a story that made the front page and Binky shows them the newspaper as proof.

This episode is similar to "Citizen Frensky", which also takes place on Take a Student to Work Day. This means that Elwood City has Take a Student to Work Day at least twice during the school year. In "Citizen Frensky", Francine is the one who goes to Bitzi's place. This might explain why, in "Binky Wrestles With a Story", Francine is disappointed that Binky gets to go there instead of her. When Binky's story makes the front page, Francine admits she was wrong and Binky did well at the job. Binky might not have done as well as Francine, though, because Francine started her own newspaper (The Frensky Star) after her successful day at Bitzi's newspaper and Binky does not do that.

Answer: Nadine

The snowball story started way back in season one in "D.W.'s Snow Mystery". In that episode we learn that D.W. saved a snowball in a freezer from her favorite winter ever, which was later revealed to be the winter of the season four episode "The Blizzard". The snowball stayed in the freezer for a year, and then it disappeared. This made D.W. cry. She wants to know who took it. Much of the rest of that episode is everybody presenting their different theories on what happened to it. That episode never reveals who the culprit is. One final scene appears to reveal that aliens took the snowball, but very few fans truly believed this.

The "And Now a Word From Us Kids" segment of that episode shows us some real-life kids presenting their theories about what happened to the snowball. After social media became popular on the internet, "Arthur" fans debated over what happened to the snowball. A lot of people thought David Read (Arthur and D.W.'s father) took the snowball. On the show over the next 25 years, there is a recurring gag where D.W. accused Arthur of stealing the snowball. We all had to wait about 25 years to find out the truth about how took it.

In the introduction to "All Will Be Revealed", D.W. once again accuses Arthur of stealing the snowball. This time, she does it in front of Bud, who did not live in Elwood City when the snowball was taken and he had not heard about it. After the title card, Bud and Rapty share a vow to find the truth about who took the snowball. The first place they go to is Fanta-City, where imaginary friends live. They see Nadine playing croquet and they ask her who took the snowball. Nadine twirls her hair and she says that the aliens took it. She then hurries away. Bud and Rapty are suspicious of Nadine because she twirled her hair while talking and she was in a hurry to leave, but they give her the benefit of the doubt at first. They then decide to talk to Buster, Elwood City's resident expert on aliens.

Buster shows them a photo of aliens taking D.W.'s snowball. He then puts snowballs in his bedroom to lure the alien who took it. A two-headed alien, where both heads look and sound like Binky, shows up. The alien tells Buster that his photo (of the aliens taking the snowball) is fake and the proof is that the kitchen door in the photo leads outside but the kitchen door in the Read house actually leads to the dining room. The two-headed Binky-esque alien then says that he took the snowball. He takes Bud, Rapty, and Buster to where the snowball is supposedly being held. They quickly discover that it is not a snowball, it is a croquet ball. This shocks the alien. Bud notices a strand of Nadine's hair next to the croquet ball. Bud and Rapty take Buster home and then they return to Fanta-City and talk to Nadine again.

After Bud shows Nadine all the clues that he found, Nadine finally admits that she took the snowball. The two-headed Binky-esque alien was going to take it, but right before he showed up, Nadine took it and put a croquet ball in its place. This fooled the alien. Nadine kept the snowball in her freezer for all this time because she was sure that Arthur was going to take it (although I have no idea why Nadine thought that because it was in the Reads' freezer for a year and Arthur knew about it and he didn't take it). Bud and Rapty convince Nadine to put it back. At the end of the episode, we hear D.W. loudly telling her parents that the snowball is back.

I never liked this ongoing storyline, which is why I did not ask about "D.W.'s Snow Mystery" in any of my season one quizzes or about "Return of the Snowball" in my quiz about season seven. I asked a few questions about episodes that briefly mention the snowball, but that's because the snowball does not play a major role in those episodes. What makes "All Will be Revealed" different from the other snowball episodes is that D.W. only appears onscreen in the introduction. After the title card, she does not appear at all! We briefly hear her voice in the end, but we do not see her. Who ever thought that D.W. would play such a small role in an episode about her snowball? The relative lack of D.W., combined with the fact that we finally learn the truth, is what makes this snowball episode more tolerable for me than the previous ones.

Answer: George

George's mother takes him to a retirement party for one of her friends. Before the party, George is not excited about going to it because he does not know what to say to adults. He asks some people for advice about making conversation. Muffy gives him some bad advice that does not work when he tries it on anyone else. Carl and Ms. MacGrady give him some good advice, but he gets too nervous to use it effectively when he tries it out on his other friends.

At the party, he remains silent when most of the people talk to him. He then goes into a room by himself. There, he meets and befriends an elderly man named Norman. Norman also does not like conversations, so he and George bond over that. Norman and George also bond over movies and videos they like. Norman tells George that he has a silent movie that will be playing at a movie theater in Elwood City.

Answer: True

In "A Cloudy Day", we see the silent movie that Norman told George about in "Making Conversation". Arthur, Buster, Muffy, and Francine walk by the theater and see George there. The other four go into the theater just to get out of the rain, with George being the only one that initially has interest in seeing the movie. When Norman charges only five cents for the movie, the other kids are perfectly willing to see it. It's a black-and-white silent movie and Norman plays the piano while the movie plays.

In the movie, Arthur and Muffy are boyfriend and girlfriend. Muffy wants an expensive piece of jewelry. Arthur cannot afford it. Muffy breaks up with him. To get money for the jewelry, Arthur gets a job at a factory run by George. Buster is Arthur's co-worker. They both do a poor job and George fires them. While walking in the street, Arthur and Buster see that Francine is trapped in the top floor of a burning building. They use a ladder to rescue her. Then they all get a job at the Sugar Bowl, but then they get fired. They end up stealing a vehicle and using the vehicle to stop a bank robbery. Arthur gets a big financial reward for this. Muffy wants Arthur back, but Arthur rejects her and asks Francine out on a date and she says yes. Buster and Muffy become boyfriend and girlfriend when the movie finishes.

All of the kids love the movie. The episode ends with Norman showing the kids a second movie. The audience never gets to see the second movie.

Answer: Bubby

Joan Rivers died in real life so her character had to die too. Bubby was Francine's grandmother. Muffy makes the situation worse by refusing to listen to Francine when she wants to talk about it. George gives Muffy some tips about listening, and Muffy becomes a better listener at the end of the episode.

Answer: Ladonna

Ladonna moved to Oregon in the season 23 episode "When Duty Calls". In the season 25 episode "Arthur's New Old Vacation", she still lives in Elwood City and she talks to Arthur at the Sugar Bowl. This suggests that "Arthur's New Old Vacation" takes place before "When Duty Calls".

This is one of many examples in which the order that "Arthur" episodes aired does not match the chronological order of the events on the show.

Answer: Writer

Muffy becomes the mayor of Elwood City, Francine becomes the CEO of a company that sells shoes, Binky becomes a weatherman, Buster becomes a teacher, and Arthur becomes a writer. The first chapter of his first book is "Arthur's Eyes", which is also the name of the first episode of the series, which suggests that this entire show is Arthur's first novel. Michael Yarmush voices the adult version of Arthur.

He voiced Arthur from season one through season five. After that, he got too old and his voice got too deep to continue the part. So, he was replaced with someone younger, and then that actor got too old and was replaced with someone younger, and so on.

In "All Grown Up", Arthur is an adult, so Michael Yarmush returns to voice Arthur as an adult.