Dexter's Laboratory

About the series

Contains story spoilers.

Dexter is a child scientist whose secret laboratory sits beneath the family home; his older sister Dee Dee repeatedly finds ways into it, while Dexter’s experiments and insistence on control create problems he must solve. Separate shorts also follow the Justice Friends, superheroes sharing an apartment, and Monkey, Dexter’s pet with a hidden heroic identity. The episodes use different premises rather than a continuous serial plot. In ‘Double Trouble,’ Dexter tries to eliminate Dee Dee from his workspace by cloning himself. Dee Dee and her friends Mee Mee and Lee Lee retaliate by making copies of themselves, and the multiplication overwhelms Dexter’s attempt to manage the situation. The conflict comes from his desire to remove his sister rather than the technical difficulty of building a cloning machine; his own solution escalates the disorder it was meant to prevent.

Dexter tries to hurry past childhood when it stands between him and something he wants. In ‘Old Man Dexter,’ the adults bar Dexter from watching The Late Early Movie because he is too young. He uses an age-acceleration machine, but Dee Dee interferes with its settings and turns him into a 95-year-old. In ‘Babysitter Blues,’ Dexter instead tries to impress Lisa, the teenage babysitter, by aging himself to eighteen. The result is an awkward, bespectacled adolescent who still cannot win her affection and must face her boyfriend. The machine does not deliver the maturity or romantic success Dexter expects in either story: in one he overshoots adulthood for a movie, and in the other an altered appearance cannot make Lisa return his feelings.

In ‘Jurassic Pooch,’ Dexter creates a Tyrannosaurus Rex using a dog’s brain and heart. Dee Dee adopts the creature as her pet, which turns an experiment meant to produce a dinosaur into an enormous household animal with canine behavior. The episode’s central mismatch is not that the animal becomes a conventional predator; its dog-like mind and Dee Dee’s attachment determine how the pair treat it. ‘The Big Sister’ reverses their size relationship: Dee Dee eats one of Dexter’s experimental cookies and grows so large that she treats the city like a dollhouse. Dexter responds by putting on the giant Robo-Dexo suit to bring her back. These stories keep the sibling dynamic central even when the scale becomes prehistoric or monumental: Dee Dee’s curiosity engages with an invention, and Dexter must adapt his technology to the consequence.

‘Game Over’ turns Dad’s newly purchased video game into a direct attack on Dexter’s lab. The software behaves like a computer virus and pulls Dexter into the game, where he is stuck in its world rather than controlling the machine from the safety of his workstation. He needs Dee Dee’s help because she is better at video games than he is. The episode gives Dexter an opponent he cannot out-invent from outside: progress depends on his willingness to rely on a sister whose expertise he normally discounts. In ‘Dream Machine,’ the threat is internal. Dexter tries to replace nightmares with pleasant dreams by connecting himself to a device and asking a barely awake Dee Dee to supervise it. The dream starts as he planned—he absorbs information, learns languages and figures out a VCR—but Dee Dee nudges the controls and sends the experience off course.

‘Spacecase’ gives Dexter a sharper moral consequence. To get rid of aliens, he tricks Dee Dee into believing they are taking her to a candy-filled destination and offers her as a test subject. Once they leave, guilt overwhelms him and he goes after her. The aliens release Dee Dee themselves after she has wrecked their ship searching for candy. Dexter’s rescue impulse arrives only after he has caused the danger, so his scientific cleverness cannot erase the fact that he treated his sister as a disposable problem. The story resolves through Dee Dee’s own destructive persistence as well as Dexter’s return, and the aliens’ cooperation ends the immediate threat. Their relationship is not made sentimental: Dexter still schemes, but the episode shows a boundary his scheme crosses and the guilt that makes him reverse course.

The Justice Friends’ ‘TV Super Pals’ shifts the focus from Dexter’s experiments to shared living space. Major Glory, Valhallen and Krunk all want to watch different television shows at the same time, and the apartment has one television. Their superpowers do not settle this ordinary disagreement; their problem is coordinating access to a single screen. Another Justice Friends episode, ‘Valhallen’s Room,’ sends Major Glory and Krunk searching for Valhallen’s missing guitar, which he needs to keep his powers. Those stories have a different rhythm from Dexter’s lab shorts: the heroes’ domestic arrangements and friendships generate the conflict, and a mundane object can matter as much as a supervillain. The contrast helps define the show’s format, where domestic comedy, science mishaps and superhero parody take turns rather than merging into one overarching campaign.

Monkey’s adventure in ‘Orgon Grindor’ gives Dexter’s pet a secret life with real consequences. Monkey is having dinner with Agent Honeydew when an alien organ grinder’s calliope hypnotizes him and draws him away. Orgon Grindor wants gold, so the controlled Monkey breaks into Fort Knox and carries out bars, even using his own hypnotic powers against Honeydew when she intervenes. She shoots the calliope to break the spell, but Orgon attacks her and raises the gold bars to crush her. Hearing Honeydew call him brings Monkey back to himself; he melts the bars with his eye beams and coats Orgon in gold. The episode returns the pair to their interrupted dessert, with the Commander left outside their private joke. The rescue depends on Honeydew reaching Monkey through the control, and Monkey choosing to protect her once he is free.