The Picnic

"The Picnic" is the twentieth episode of Season 1 of The Amazing World of Gumball.

Synopsis
After not listening properly to instructions given to them by Miss Simian, Gumball and Darwin must survive in the Forest of Doom.

Plot
The class has taken a school bus to a rural area, planning to walk the rest of the way to an unnamed picnic area to have a picnic. Miss Simian outlines the route they will take, specifically stating three times to avoid the Forest of Doom. The camera zooms in to Gumball and Darwin, who were sitting in the back having trouble hearing Miss Simian. Gumball mistakenly believes that they are supposed to go through The Forest of Doom. Miss Simian and the rest of the class leave before he can confirm this with her. Gumball and Darwin are left to travel through The Forest of Doom by themselves. Gumball, being a self-proclaimed survival expert, feels confident.

After three warnings that they are going somewhere dangerous (first an evil laughing tree, next squirrels who deviously smile at the plan of eating their deceased carcasses and say that Gumball & Darwin will never get out alive, lastly the wind telling them twice that they are going the wrong way), they end up at a cliff, lost.

Gumball then attempts to follow Miss Simian's smell, the way a dog would. Using their senses of smell, they pick up a scent similar to Miss Simian's, so they follow it. It turns out to be a stinky outhouse.

Next, they decide to find their way using the stars. Darwin remarks that there are no stars, only the sun. Gumball reminds him that the sun is a star. And so they stare at it for a while to try to find their way. Obviously, it ends up burning their eyes. Their eyes burning from the staring at the sun, the duo starts running and screaming, coincidentally right past Miss Simian and the rest of the class. Miss Simian leads them on as Gumball and Darwin run by. They run into a tree and fall to the floor. Gumball finally admits that they are lost.

Gumball and Darwin sit by the tree. Gumball feels sad at how he isn't as good a survivalist as he thought he was, while Darwin remains optimistic, trying to cheer Gumball up. Darwin then suggests lunch, bringing out his lunchbox full of fish flakes and diet fish flakes, but Gumball throws it away and tells Darwin that they can get much better food out in "nature's supermarket". He explains the structure of food in a silly way:

"Everything is made from little bits. The bits themselves are made from the smallest bits of all: Circles! Circles with other little circles going around them. So, since everything is made from circles, then so is food!"

He demonstrates this concept by attempting to eat a rock. He and Darwin both bite the rock at the same time. Both of their teeth shatter. They decide to try eating something else. Darwin points out a deer, and they plot to kill and eat it. Gumball says that he is a predator, and he has claws. He then attempts to roar (but only ends up meowing).

The two of them sneak up to the deer. When they finally reach it, Gumball hesitates, stopped by either his conscience or the creature's smelly behind. He tells Darwin to attack it first. So Darwin "fish slaps" it with his fin. It does nothing but anger the creature, which wasn't a deer, but some hideous, green, quadrupedal chicken. Gumball and Darwin shy away, pretending the slap was a mistake.

They retreat to a tree, where they find a smaller, more manageable animal to feast on: a one-eyed, colorful caterpillar. As Gumball brings the creature to his mouth, Darwin begs him to spare its life because it's cute. After looking at the worm's crying face and taking the same feeling, Gumball agrees and lets the caterpillar go. As it slithers away, they yell out encouragement to it. Suddenly, a fish-bird thing swoops down and grabs the worm. The bird gets eaten by a tentacled koala. The tentacled koala gets eaten by some gryphon thing. The gryphon thing gets eaten by a huge moose-like creature. All of this happens in the span of 20 seconds, and Gumball and Darwin stare in silent horror as it goes on. As if the mere horror of watching this unfold wasn't enough, the moose-like predator starts chasing them.

Immediately they run up a tree, thinking they lost the creature. Suddenly, they hear a growl, but find out it was just Darwin's stomach expressing it's hunger. After a few complaints from Darwin about hunger and cold, Gumball decides to make a fire to warm them.

Back on the ground, Gumball tries making a fire using a bow drill. He spins the stick as fast as he can, but only manages to ignite his hands, causing him to run around in a panic. As he runs around, the fire starts where he intended it to. The two exchange a quick high five, after which rain starts pouring down on them, dousing the fire. Now cold and even hungrier, the two huddle up around the tree.

Meanwhile, at the picnic area, the kids that followed Miss Simian are stuffed, having had three servings of quintuple-decker sandwiches and getting ready for a fourth.

Back at the Forest of Doom, Gumball and Darwin still complain of their hunger, when Darwin suddenly attacks Gumball, apparently intending to eat him, though in actually, he successfully eats Gumball's clothes, leaving Gumball naked. Gumball's voice has an echo while the birds fly away. An argument ensues after Darwin repeatedly reminds Gumball that he threw away their only food. Gumball eventually starts berating Darwin and sets out on his own. In his anger, he didn't notice he was walking off a cliff. After a painful fall, he finds himself in an even scarier area of the forest, with predators surrounding and circling him. The three predators show themselves and start slowly and menacingly moving toward Gumball. All Gumball can do is beg for someone to save him. Suddenly, Darwin jumps down and, in a macho voice, announces his intentions to protect his teammate. When the monsters ignore his warnings, he "fish slaps" the biggest one and scolds it, causing it to run away crying. The other two follow suit after another threat from Darwin. Gumball and Darwin make up, and they continue on to the picnic (with Darwin carrying Gumball on his back because Gumball twisted his ankle during the fall).

After an unspecified amount of time, they arrive at the picnic, looking starved and disheveled. They spot a garbage can full of trash and immediately dive into it, eating all the scraps of food they can find. The kids are horrified at the sight of this, and Leslie points this out to Miss Simian, who nonchalantly dismisses it and announces that the picnic is over and they need to head back to the bus. Once again, she stresses out going around the forest of doom. Gumball and Darwin, gorging themselves on garbage, didn't hear this. As they peek out of the garbage can, satisfied with their meal, they discover everyone gone. Then the episode ends with Darwin asking whether they need to go through the Forest of Doom, or around it.

Main Characters

 * Gumball
 * Darwin
 * The Creatures (debut)

Supporting Characters

 * Miss Simian

Minor Characters

 * Leslie
 * Banana Joe
 * Tobias
 * Idaho
 * Penny
 * Clayton
 * The Sun
 * Bobert
 * William
 * Molly
 * Juke
 * Anton
 * Tina
 * Ocho
 * Masami
 * Alan

Trivia

 * Throughout this episode, characters in distant shots were drawn as simple, colored rectangles. For instance while Gumball was painfully falling over the cliffside, he was only seen as a little blue rectangle rather than his usually animated self.
 * Leslie's voice does not match up with his previous appearances. This is another instance where a character's voice sounds inconsistent between episodes, a problem inherent to the first season.
 * During the picnic, less people were seen than were shown to be on the bus.
 * This is the first time a character dies on screen, in this case some of The Creatures.

Continuity

 * This episode taps a little bit into Gumball and Darwin's animal roots, such as Gumball having claws and Darwin eating food in flake form. A similar instance with Darwin happened in "The Party," when he showed he was part suckerfish.
 * This is the first time Gumball literally meows like an actual cat. He does it again in "The Fight."
 * This is the second time Gumball is seen naked, again with his intimate parts censored by pixelation as in "The Dress."

Cultural References

 * The wind whispering to Gumball and Darwin "You're Going The Wrong Way" mostly likely is a reference to this scene from the 1987 John Hughes film Plains, Trains and Automobiles.
 * The explanation of food leading to everything being connected in a "Circle of Life" refers to the song from the 1994 Disney film The Lion King.
 * The scene where the Forest of Doom creatures try to eat Gumball is similar to a scene in Where The Wild Things Are.

Goofs/Errors

 * In the beginning, the bus for some reason says "Watterson Junior High" instead of "Elmore Junior High."
 * Near the end of the episode, Darwin eats Gumball's clothes, leaving him naked. But when Gumball pops out of the trash can, he has his clothes back.
 * When everyone on the bus says, "Yes, Miss Simian," Tina Rex doesn't have any teeth.
 * When both Gumball and Darwin say "bye-bye" to the caterpillar, Gumball doesn't have any whiskers.
 * In the beginning, Darwin's shadows are missing.
 * When the monsters are about to attack Gumball, two of those monsters were supposely ate by the one-eyed moose (although it could be that the moose spat them out off-screen, or they may be different creatures altogether).
 * When the monsters began to eat Gumball, his mouth was the wrong color.
 * When Gumball and Darwin were shown on the bus, their outlines were animated differently.
 * When Gumball and Darwin were sneaking up on the creature, Gumball's left hand was black.
 * When Gumball and Darwin were watching the monsters eat each other, Darwin's right arm was black.