Toot Braunstein is also one of the main characters in the Drawn Together franchise. She is a fat, egotistical and alcoholic retro-style sex symbol who is a parody of Betty Boop. Toot demands to be the center of attention, cuts herself with razor blades, practices poor personal hygiene and eats excessively when depressed and often instigates conflict in the house.
Biography[]
Toot Braunstein (born in the 1900s) is a fictional character in the animated series Drawn Together. She is one of the eight housemates who are the focus of the show. Toot is labeled as an outdated black and white heartthrob from the 1920s.
Appearance[]
An overweight sex symbol from the 1920s who demands to be the center of attention, cuts herself with razor blades when depressed, and often instigates conflict in the house. She is based on Betty Boop. Most of her humor revolves around her unattractiveness (especially her weight), her gluttony, her poor personal hygiene, or her frequent bouts of psychosis and alcoholism. Among reality show archetypes, she is the manipulative, although later evolves into the dumpy fat/unpopular girl archetype. According to creators Jeser and Silverstein, Toot is partially based on Amy Crews from Big Brother 3. Toot's passion for cheese, as well as her tendency to cry and put on weight (from "Requiem for a Reality Show"), come directly from Crews. In an interview on Comedy Central's website, Strong states that Toot is her favorite role in her career. In original artwork before the show's release, Toot had longer hair, a thin waist (with broad hips), and wore a strapless dress. In the third season, Toot becomes a much more sympathetic character, and her role as the show's mean-spirited character is largely taken over by Clara.
Personality[]
Toot is a suicidal borderline personality who copes with life through alcoholism, binge eating, and self-mutilation. According to Tara Strong, Toot lives in a fantasy world, insisting that she is still a beautiful sex symbol under the delusion that all the men want her [4]. Her extreme gluttony is one of her most exploited traits; Toot is known for eating indigestible objects such as a TV and a cell phone, particularly when frustrated (she eats the TV when she is unable to find the remote in "The Other Cousin"). In "A Tale of Two Cows", Toot ate wall insulation that she thought was cotton candy, which made her mouth bleed. She frequently consumes enormous amounts of food in one sitting, and on occasion even resorts to cannibalism. (See Unusual items eaten, below.) Toot once ate Ling-Ling accidentally during an eating binge (she later regurgitated him), and ate Wooldoor once after announcing she could not stop eating (eventually defecating him into a puddle on the floor after adding that she had irritable bowel syndrome). She is also quite fond of cheese, as she is often seen eating cheese-related products; in "Hot Tub" she carries a can of spray cheese around with her for much of the episode, and in "N.R.A.y RAY", she wishes for a large amount of cheese. Her drinking is also mentioned frequently; her dependence on alcohol is in evidence in several different episodes, most notably in "Dirty Pranking No. 2" and "Captain Girl". She is a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, though this has not curtailed her drinking to any visible degree; a phone conversation with her sponsor seems to indicate her unwillingness to admit how much of a problem she has. Toot is often prone to fits of rage and physical aggression seemingly at random. Toot legitimately cannot understand why men are not attracted to her, and has developed a distinct bitterness because of it. In the first episode, she had a crush on Xandir, but her affections were unrequited. When it was revealed that he was gay, she comforted herself by saying that was the only reason why he didn't want to go out with her, until Wooldoor told her that "nobody likes fat chicks". Once she realized she had no hope of being considered the show's sex symbol, and that she enjoyed seeing Xandir panic after lying to him and his girlfriend, she decided to become the "bitch," intentionally trying to cause friction amongst the housemates by doing such things as convincing Clara that she is pregnant with Foxxy's child, eating all the food in the house, and lying to Super Nanny in order to get Captain Hero in trouble. She is usually the first to take action whenever a conflict of some sort presents itself. She is the first one to pull a gun in the Mexican standoff scene in "The One Wherein There Is a Big Twist", and suggests that the housemates destroy the house. She also reluctantly goes along with The Apprentice parody that results from Foxxy staging a sit-in, and recruits the losing housemates in an attempt to destroy the house. However, as the third season progresses, Toot's role as the bitch diminishes as the title begins to shift over to Princess Clara (see Clara's Darker Side). Later episodes show Toot in a more sympathetic (albeit piteous) light, while Clara becomes more malicious, a prime example being the story in "N.R.A.y RAY". In that episode, Toot's feelings of loneliness are explored while Clara is portrayed as a villain, acting shallow and selfish while insulting Toot for no apparent reason. Later, when Toot discovers Clara has been murdered as a result of her wish to have her removed from the house, Toot becomes horrified rather than glad. Similarly, Toot's reputation for being sexually undesirable also begins to turn around. In "A Very Special Drawn Together Afterschool Special", she has sex with Captain Hero while playing as Xandir's father during the episode's role-playing exercise. In "Freaks & Greeks", she becomes the object of adoration of Ling-Ling's father Jun-Jee; the two French kiss seconds after meeting, and even end up marrying each other, though the relationship is called off when Jun-Jee realizes she is only interested in him for his money. In "Unrestrainable Trainable", Toot has a threesome with Foxxy and Spanky, a situation portrayed with a complete casualness suggesting it is a frequent occurrence. In "N.R.A.y RAY", she attracts the attention of not one but two guys, the titular Ray-Ray, and a boy named Mike Jerowski (who is said to be "the most popular boy in school"), whom she ends up with at the end of the episode despite being told he only dates cheerleaders. As Toot had originally become the house bitch because of her perceived failure to achieve the role of a sex symbol after being rejected by Xandir, this additional attention may be one reason why she is less actively malicious than she had been earlier in the series. Other episodes show her being more sympathetic and helpful to her housemates than she had been previously; she apologizes to Xandir on behalf of the housemates for initially not taking the role-playing seriously in "A Very Special Drawn Together Afterschool Special" and returns to save Ling-Ling from the King of Mexico in "Mexican't Buy Me Love" after initially refusing to help him. Toot desperately craves attention, becoming upset when other characters are getting a lot of attention. (For example, in "Terms of Endearment", she refers to a cancer-stricken Foxxy Love as "Miss Tumor For Attention".) She seems jealous of Princess Clara in particular, although this is most likely an in-joke in that both characters are voiced by the same person. Clara claims that Toot is a one-joke character, that joke being how fat she is. In truth, Toot's unstable emotional state (she has a strong tendency to become manic at the slightest of provocation) is also a common subject of jokes. She frequently uses her own name as an expletive (e.g. "These competitions are bull-toot!" "What the toot?"), and occasionally says her name while giggling ("Hee hee hee toot!"). Her catchphrases are "God damn it," shouted in a shrill, sometimes reverberating voice, and "I'll cut you!", which Toot usually uses when assaulting or bullying Wooldoor. Toot is an unlucky character in that she has been killed off in a number of episodes. Although all of the housemates are killed from time to time as part of one of the show's running gags (some episodes result in all or most of the cast dying at once), to date, Toot has died most often out of the entire group. (see also Housemate deaths) One key difference is that many of her misfortunes are self-inflicted; she often commits suicide or dies as a result of an accident that she caused. In "Hot Tub" she falls and hits her head twice while high on helium, cuts off her own head to get Xandir to notice her, and is eaten by Ling-Ling after unwittingly accepting his challenge. Ironically, Toot doesn't die in "Alzheimer's That Ends Well", an episode in which a group of senior citizens makes multiple attempts to kill her. She was also the last housemate to die in "The Drawn Together Movie- The Movie" judging on her distance from the eraser bomb Spanky stepped on in the end of the movie, in which Toot made through all the way to the end.
Behind the scenes[]
- In season one, her blood is black, but in later episodes, it is a normal crimson red.
- This was most notable in the episode "The One Wherein There Is a Big Twist, Part II" where they were showing previews of future episodes, a clip of the episode "Clum Babies" showed Toot getting shot in the confessional and her gray blood splattering on the screen. In the actual episode, however, her blood was red.
- Also in the first episode, Toot's breasts were revealed to be very firm and in shape. However, in future episodes, they were shown to be majorly sagging down, wrinkled, and dragging on the ground.
- In the first episode, Toot's voice is accompanied by a scratchy gramophone effect, in line with the character's 1920's origins. This effect would not be used in any subsequent episodes.
- Toot had no spoken dialogue in the episodes Foxxy vs. the Board of Education and Nipple Ring-Ring Goes to Foster Care.
"Toot" is slang for "prostitute."