Mystery Meat

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"Mystery Meat" *Danny Phantom episode*
Mystery Meat title card "All New! In Terrifying Meat-Vision!"
Season	1
Number	1
Prod. code	001
Airdate	April 3, 2004
Special Guest(s)	Patricia Heaton as The Lunch Lady Ghost
Writer(s)	Butch Hartman, Steve Marmel, Mark Banker
Director	Butch Hartman
Ghost Appearances	Ectopusses (1st), Lunch Lady Ghost (1st)
Abbreviation	MM

Next episode
Parental Bonding

"Mystery Meat" is the first, and subsequently the pilot episode of the animated series Danny Phantom. Danny must confront the ghost of a lunch lady while dealing with his two best friends Tucker and Sam over the lunch menu changes.

[edit] Episode Recap

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Set approximately one month after Danny got his powers, Danny and his two best friends, Tucker and Sam listen as Jack rambles on about ghosts inside the Fenton lab. While Jack is showing off his inventions, and explaining how they work, the ghost portal mysteriously opens, releasing two ectopusses. Danny saves Tucker and Sam from them before Jack sees anything.

Jack talks about ghosts with the kids

Afterwards, a typical day in the Fenton family is revealed when Jack and Maddie invents a new machine to track ghosts, something which easily tracks Danny down, much to the parent's confusion and dismay. Fearful, Danny nearly confesses his given powers until Jazz interrupts, accusing said parents of polluting his mind and offering to drive him to school. Maddie makes a note that Jazz never drives Danny to school to which Jack immediately suspects she's a ghost.

In school, Danny confesses and shows his difficulty in controlling his ghost powers, so much to the point where he is considering telling his parents, something which Sam opposes, thinking it makes him unique. The subject later changes by lunch time in which Sam has influenced the change of the school menu with an all vegetarian food diet, much to everyone's dismay. Meanwhile, in the Fenton basement lab, a Lunch Lady Ghost escapes the ghost portal, smelling the distinct vegetables, vowing to get revenge on the one who changed her 50 year straight all meat menu while the unknowing Fenton parents finish their Fenton Extractor to use on Jazz (Much to Maddie's worries).

During lunchtime, Danny and Tucker expresses their dismay over the new menu as does Dash Baxter, Danny's bully. Before Dash can take his aggression out on Danny, the later's ghost sense comes and he spots the Lunch Lady Ghost making her way to the school kitchen. Danny quickly starts a food fight to distract the students as he and his friends escape into the kitchen. There, Danny and the Lunch Lady battle it out when she discovered Sam was responsible for the menu change, thoroughly bent on destroying everything in sight until the menu returns to what it once was. Too powerful for him to conter, Danny makes off with his two friends. Unfortunately she catches up and uses the meat hidden in the teacher's lounge to turn herself into a meat monster. Kidnapping Sam, Danny's rescue is interrupted when his power short out (due to his current inexperience) and Lancer catching both him and Tucker, Dash having told the teacher of the food fight earlier. Using his intangibility powers though, Danny and Tucker escape from the office while Lancer leaves to decide on a punishment for the two, lowering themselves to the storage room to rescue Sam (located through Tucker's amazing meat sniffing powers).

They manage to find Sam trapped below neck in a pile of meat, the Lunch Lady trying to force Sam eat meat. While Danny handles the ghost, Tucker frees Sam. The three eventually escape from the storage room when again she becomes too much for the ghost boy to handle. Danny denies to Sam that he's tired from the overuse of his powers, but he falls to the ground, lying on the grass motionless and back into his human self.

Danny is about to fight the Lunch Lady in her giant meat form.

Tucker & Sam take Danny (still unconscious) home after the Fenton parents ambush Jazz, only for it to fail and instead cause her to be even more flustered and angry. Danny wakes up in bed and realizes that he has passed out and is immediately treated to Tucker and Sam's battle over vegetables and meat, both storming off the room afterwards.

Come the next day, Sam and Tucker have each organized a protest on their school with crowds of people supporting their cause: Tucker for meat, and Sam for veggies. The protests are crashed by the Lunch Lady Ghost and her minions while Jazz is once again pursued by her parents only for it to fail once again. As a result, Jack openly confesses that he would forever give up ghost hunting until he shortly witnesses Danny Phantom (who now received the Fenton Thermos Jack threw). Using it, he traps all the meat minions inside and the Lunch Lady herself. Danny decides now and then it'll be in his best interest not to tell his folks about his ghost powers, that he realizes why he has his given powers what what he plans to do with them. Unfortunately, he and his friends all get in trouble with Mr. Lancer again and are forced to clean up all the meat in the school.

[edit] Allusions

Title: "Mystery Meat" refers to meat based dishes with an unidentifiable main ingredient used in cafeteria food, generally in the American public school system.

Caption: The meat-vision could be a reference to a 'super-power' used by Mighty-Mom and Dyno-Dad in The Fairly Oddparents, another Butch Hartman cartoon.