Cartoon
Rick Moranis in Gravedale High

Animal
Corpulent Corpse

Outfit: mummification shroud / hair bows / glasses / public toilet seat cover

Tagline: "Please take a seat, yeah! We're dying to meet ya!"

Plot summary: It's amazing that a company that had no problem making 300 cartoons about teenagers solving mysteries & 300 more about nature-dwelling species of talking animals didn't hop on the bandwagon involving high schools with stereotypical, unruly teenagers in bizarre locations sooner. Gravedale High's bizarre campus locale was in the middle of the cemetery, its student stereotypes ranging from Cleofatra, the tubby mummy, to a snake-haired valley girl, a surfer dude from the Black Lagoon, & a greaser vampire, whom the show's writers covered up the fact that they let him out in daylight without thinking about the whole It Kills Vampires thing by saying that he "uses lots of sunscreen." If he was a year older, the writers would make the excuse that he "had the time of his life (good riddance)."

Calling the show "Rick Moranis in Gravedale High" was an odd move. Sure, Rick Moranis was hot off the family entertainment success of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids from the year before, but besides providing the voice of the only living, human teacher in Gravedale High, a show that never actually revolved around the living, human teacher, he wasn't even the biggest name in the cast. The rest of the faculty included Jonathan Winters, Eileen Brennan & Tim Curry, & they each got almost as much on-screen time as Moranis's character. They should've called in the guy who suggested a year earlier that they not call it "Whoopi Goldberg in Captain Planet & the Planeteers."  (more)

User Comments: Cleofatra is both the walking dead & a walking "more like" joke. An obvious take on the name of the famous fortune-telling floating eyeball from Zelda, her voice was provided by talk show host Ricki Lake. If you squint, Cleofatra even looks a little like Ricki Lake if she was caught at the wrong end of a Mischief Night prank.

Any joke involving Cleo on the show can basically be summed up as "food lol." Though I wouldn't be surprised if there was an episode of her trying to lose weight by starving herself until she sheds enough toilet paper to look good in a thong bikini. Not that anything was really stopping her...

You're probably wondering why Cleo's body hasn't deteriorated over the centuries since she was alive & getting her name laughed at in ancient Egypt. This is probably due to a process called soponification, in which the fat of a corpse slowly saturates into a black, soapy substance. Keep thinking about that, & maybe you can look good in a thong bikini this summer. Or you could think about using Cleofatra to make soap while you're beating up your imaginary friend in your secret club meeting. Either that, or Cleo actually was big-boned, & it wasn't just her mummy trying to help her feel better about herself. Her daddy, on the other hand, is probably the very drunken jerk who gave her the name Cleofatra.

If nothing else, Cleofatra does explain why there isn't any left of one monster cereal. Now if we could just figure out what happened to Fruit Brute.

User Rating: 2.4/10 (4,306 votes)