The Master Builders

"The Master Builders"
Season/Series:	21
Number in season:	2
Original Airdate:	October 24, 2017
Credits
Written by:	Peter K. Hirsch
Storyboard by:	Gerry Capelle Michel Carbonneau
Episodes
Previous "Brain and the Time Capsule"	Next "Francine & the Soccer Spy"
Read transcript

"The Master Builders" is the second episode in the twenty-first season of Arthur. It is a two-part episode.

Summary

Buster struggles to build a birdhouse that will save the community garden from pests, while Muffy and Francine design a cat toy that they think will really change the pet toy game.

Plot

The introduction shows Muffy, Francine, Buster and George as the leaders of Skywire Industries. They all argue about who owns the company and who is the Chief Inventor. Muffy wants to prove that she is the brains of the company by starting the show.

The Master Builders

Buster visits Fritz Langley at the retirement home and brings him some vegetables from the Community Garden. Mr. Langley discovers that the cabbages have been partly eaten by cabbage butterflies and recalls how their caterpillars once almost ruined the garden until purple martins ate them up. He decides to build a birdhouse.

Muffy gives Francine an ugly bracelet as a present. When Francine accidentally snaps it, Nemo cannot get enough of playing with it. Inspired by a story about Buck Benders, the pet toy merchant, in Mini Mogul Magazine, the girls decide to start their own company.

Mr. Langley and Buster build a birdhouse and raise it on a pole. Mr. Langley has to leave and asks Buster to put in the last four bolts to secure the pole. Since there is no ratchet in the toolbox, Buster goes home. He finds a ratchet there, but then he gets a call from Arthur and forgets all about it.

Muffy and Francine test cat toys on Nemo. They decide to name their company Skywire, after their last names.

The next morning, after a stormy night, Buster sees the ratchet and remembers, but the birdhouse has fallen over and is ruined. Buster does not dare to tell Mr. Langley, so he wants to build another birdhouse.

Francine and Muffy want to sell their product, the Fruffy, to a pet store. The owner is skeptical, but after the girls manage to get a reaction from an extremely lazy cat, he orders 30 Fruffies. The girls wonder how they can make that many.

Buster has built a birdhouse out of cardboard, but it is destroyed by rain. He pays George to build a proper birdhouse.

Francine and Muffy ask Mr. Crosswire for help, but he believes that they should learn to solve problems on their own.

Buster dreams that he is walking through a field of giant carrots where he meets Mr. Langley looking like the caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland. He learns that the butterflies have infected the garden so anyone who eats from there, turns into a caterpillar. Buster starts transforming and calls the purple martins for help, but they want to eat him.

George wants to build a fancy birdhouse that would take months to build. He grudgingly agrees to keep it simple.

Francine makes Fruffies, but finds it exhausting. Muffy brings new raw materials and they realize that they would have to charge 22 dollars to make a profit. They are interrupted by Catherine who has brought a vase she made on her school's 3D printer. The girls ask for Catherine's help, but she only agrees when Francine offers to do Catherine's chores for two months.

Buster visits George to see how the birdhouse is coming along, but he can only talk to Wally.

At Catherine's school, she explains the 3D printer to the younger girls and they make a batch of 15 Fruffies.

George calls Buster to say that the birdhouse is ready, but he and his dad have made it too big to fit on the pole.

Francine and Muffy deliver the first batch of Fruffies, only to learn that the pet store has just received a mass-produced version by Buck Benders.

Francine, Muffy, George and Buster all meet at the ice-cream shop and talk about their failures. Muffy gets the idea of making a birdhouse with the 3D printer.

Some time later, Mr. Langley admires a printed birdhouse which has already attracted many martins. The kids wonder if they should go into business. They have a vision of arguing, like they did in the introduction, and think better of it.

Characters

• Buster Baxter
• Fritz Langley
• George Lundgren
• Muffy Crosswire
• Francine Frensky
• Bitzi Baxter
• Ed Crosswire
• Wally
• Potato (Cat)
• Arthur Read
• Catherine Frensky
• Pet Store Owner
• Nemo
• Brain(cameo)
• Mrs. Powers(cameo)
• Portia Demwiddy(cameo)

Trivia

• It is revealed in this episode that Catherine attends a Career and Technical Education high school, and uses the school's 3D printer.
• This is the first episode where Fritz has a major role since "Buster's Garden of Grief."

Episode connections

• In the beginning of the episode, Muffy is wearing the same outfit that she wore when she was a news reporter in "Maria Speaks."

Cultural references

• At the beginning of the second part, Fritz is depicted to be like "Absolem" from Lewis Carrol's book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Instead of smoking a hookah, he is blowing bubbles.