The Angry Beavers was never my favorite show growing up, but they did have one episode that stuck with me my entire life, and that episode is The Day The World Got Really Screwed Up; or the most underrated Halloween special of all time, as me and my brother fondly remember it as. After being raised on The Simpson’s Treehouse of Horrors, we had quite the nice foundation for Halloween viewing, but nothing could have prepared us for what Norbert and Dag had in store for us that Halloween, 1998.

This episode so completely mocks and magnifies practically every trope in the B-movie horror genre, and it does so with such consistency and authenticity. The first foray into the parody comes in the form of the man servant of the Beaver’s favorite actor Oxnard Montalvo, a man servant named Mann Servante, who’s mind has been taken over by an alien. He promptly falls down an impossibly long staircase. Twice.

When the Beaver’s finally meet Oxnard, he is exactly what every B-movie star should be—manly, action-oriented, booming voice. But unlike those stars, he is woefully uncoordinated, a complete tool, and ineffective in every way. Right away, we’re ticketed to the kind of conversation that makes this episode comically perfect—

Doc: We’re in a pickle.
Oxnard: What kind of pickle, doc?
Doc: Picture the largest gherkin you’ve ever seen… then magnify it by a thousandfold.

Cue the scream, the token move of Toluca Lake, Oxnard’s female sidekick, and cue the fingers-on-chin, contemplative side-to-side glance of Oxnard. This is not the last time you’ll be enjoying either reaction.

Oxnard Montalvo continues to deliver cackle-inducing one-liners like, “Anything is possible Doc… if it happens,” or “Another moment and it would have been… later.” You could base an entire philosophical manifesto around the logic of Oxnard Montalvo, and I recommend you do so.

And then there’s Toluca Lake, who embodies all the worst tropes of women characters in horror movies with her sheer incompetence and fragile body. Oxnard tells her to run, she runs right into a cement wall. Every time they nearly get away, she breaks an ankle until at the end, her ankles are wrapped so heavily in bandages that they look like tops.

What makes all this humor so effective, though, is that every bit doesn’t just happen once. Save for the laugh of Mann Servante, which you’ll be wishing to hear again when it’s unleashed for that rare moment. Otherwise, the humor is all interconnected all the way to the end. Toluca’s ankles, Oxnard’s failed manliness, the Doc always having a film to show that explains everything. In that sense, while it mocks the cheesy horror genre, it does so with a self-awareness that the movies it mocks lack.

There are comedic beats in here that match the sense of humor of films like Airplane! as well. Take for instance this gem of a conversation when a military general (appropriately named General Warning) calls Oxnard in the midst of the fracas—

General: Oxnard, we’re getting a reading that your house has become a hotbed of extraterrestrial activity. What’s going on up there?
Oxnard: General, my house has become a hotbed of extraterrestrial activity.
General: Sounds serious.

Cue the montage of actual footage of military men scrambling to go to war. As well as sumo wrestlers and sea turtles, because we’re all laughing here.

You have to pay attention to the small things too. Everything is intentional. Take, for instance, when the fluorescent light fixture is repeatedly banging Oxnard in the back of the head. Same thing when Oxnard lifts a book shelf to throw at a monster, but all the books fall out on his head and he flings the shelf and hits poor Toluca (“Missed.”), who had just started to run away again.

Not to take anything away from the Beavers, who deliver some funny bits, like how they say “Candaaay,” but the humor here is built around on the world that surrounds them. What humor they bring feels like the low bar that allows the rest of the funny bits to hit with such beautiful perfection.

What works so perfectly about the episode is how aware the writers are of the brilliance and the flaws of horror B-movies. It felt like they’d been watching these movies all their lives and took all the best and worst parts and funneled it into a single episode of The Angry Beavers. Each character has their own unique humor that intersect with every other character in such simple, yet hilarious fashion and it’s so full of small beats that it’s well worth to watch again… and again.

If not just for the magnificent moment Mann Servante laughs.

Josh Sippie is the Director of Publishing Guidance at Gotham Writers and an Associate Editor of Uncharted Mag. His writing can be found at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Hobart, Brevity, Sledgehammer Lit, Wretched Creations, Not Deer, and more. When not writing, he can be found wondering why he isn't writing. More at joshsippie.com or Twitter @sippenator101.