Episode
Even Stevens: Battle of the Bands
Overview
Louis is managing Twitty's band. They've got a chance for a gig at a big party thrown by Jason Bagwell, so they are auditioning for a lead singer. Ren hates the band until she gets a look at Jason, then she decides she wants to be the singer in order to go to the party. Louis says no way, but the band likes her much better than the parade of freaks they've been auditioning. Fearing Ren will take over, Louis puts Ren's membership to a vote. The band all vote for Ren and against Louis. Frustrated, Louis gets Tom to program a few instuments and he forms a rival techno band featuring the bizarre poetry of Tawny. Both bands audition before Jason. He rejects them both, but proves himself to be such a jerk that no one wants to get the job anyway. The two groups form a ""super band"" and play their own big gig--at a kids' birthday party.
Details
- Series
- Even Stevens
- Season
- Season 1
- Episode
- Episode 14
- Air date
- 2000-11-24
- Runtime
- 22 min
Episode context
Battle of the Bands is Episode 14 in Season 1 of Even Stevens. It aired on 2000-11-24. The runtime is 22 min.
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Episode 13: After Hours
Louis makes Ren late for school on the Friday when she's supposed to set up her display for Lawrence Junior High's 75th anniversary. She assures Principal Wexler she'll have it done in time for Monday. While Wexler is going out of town, Coach Tugnut, about number 6 in line, is put in charge of the school. In gym class a girl Ren hardly knows named Chloe spends too much time talking to her and Coach gives both of them detention! Ren feals uneasy in the strange world of detention, run by a sleeping teacher and full of the school's misfits. The king of detention turns out to be none other than her brother Louis, who runs a gambling operation featuring racing hamsters. Tugnut shows up. Everything is hidden from him but he questions Ren. She doesn't rat out Louis, which gains her some respect in his eyes.
Ren needs to work on her display before Monday but doesn't know how she could possibly do that. Louis offers to help her by breaking into the school after hours. When they arrive there Ren
Episode 15: Heck of a Hanukkah
Ren is surprised by Louis, who she finds in her closet looking for Hanukkah presents. In the process he messes up her room and breaks Donnie's trophy's trying to run away from her. Keeping up his search, Louis finds the presents in the basement. Upstairs, Ren asks her mom to tell the Hanukkah story again (Eileen's side of the family is Jewish.) Louis hears his dad coming upstairs to get him, so he hastily wraps the presents in a blanket and dangles them outside his window. The presents all go crashing to the driveway. When the family sees what happens, Louis is in trouble with them all. Feeling sorry for himself later, Louis wishes out loud that he hadn't been born into this family where he doesn't fit in.
Suddenly in great flashes of light an old woman appears to Louis. It's the spirit of his great-great-great-great grandmother Bubbie Rose. She's heard Louis complaining and is ready to take him on a trip to see what would have happened if he hadn't been born. They travel to the Steven
More episodes from this season
Episode 12: Deep Chocolate (aka Chocolate Wars)
Ren is lobbying to get her own telephone. Her parents say she can have it if she keeps from insulting Louis for a week. At school, sleazy salesman Mr. Wallace promotes the 7th grade chocolate sale, offering a state-of-the-art motor scooter as a prize for the most sales. Louis catches scooter fever and makes plans with Twitty to sell 400 boxes of chocolate. By mistake Louis and Twitty both order 400 boxes, and Mr. Wallace tells them they're financially responsible for all of them. Twitty and Louis fight about who's to blame and break up their partnership.
The next day Louis gets up early to start selling the chocolate, but his sales technique is lousy compared to Twitty, who even sold Mrs. Stevens six bars. Back at home Donny has used so much hot water in the shower that all the stored chocolate in the garage has melted and is sliding down the driveway. Mr. Stevens slips and falls in it, as does Wallace when he comes by demanding payment. Mr. Stevens tells him off and threatens to sue
Episode 16: Luscious Lou
Coach Tugnut need a wrestler in Louis' weight class, and always looking for something to excel at, Louis tries out for the team. He does very well in the practices, but he's horrified to learn his first opponent will be the dreaded Mimi Nagurski! Knowing that wrestling a girl is a lose-lose situation for him, Louis tries to quickly gain enough weight to make himself ineligible. When that doesn't work he shows up at the match in a silly costume callling himself ""Luscious Lou,"" bragging about how he's the wrestler who uses love insted of force. He tries to get the crowd behind him but they don't buy it, so he has to go ahead and wrestle Nagurski. Also, Ren tries to get back at Louis with practical jokes of her own, but they end up backfiring on Donnie instead.
Episode 11: Secrets and Spies
Mrs. Stevens wants Ren to take an internship with a city councilman. Ren's schedule is already overloaded, but she says yes to please her mother. Louis finds clues that lead him to believe that Ren is up to something secret. When he finds out another girl got the internship that Ren told their mother she'd gotten, he begins spying on her. He follows her to Tokyo Rick's restaurant, where he's surprised to see Ren singing onstage under the name ""Isis."" Louis torments Ren by doing things like putting up posters all over school advertising her appearance at the restaurant. He also persuades his parents to go to Tokyo Rick's. Ren gets mad at him and calls him a ""nothing boy."" She apologizes and confesses that she's been singing to release some of the pressure from all her other duties. Louis now wants to stop his parents from going to the restaurant, but they've already left. He catches them there and tries to distract them, but they see Ren. After some explaining, the four of them end up o
Episode 17: Get a Job
Louis tries to butter up his father so he'll buy him a used Sludgee machine from the convenience store, but Mr. Stevens has three words for him: get a job. Ren is a volunteer career counselor at school and she gets Louis three different jobs, including one in ""journalism"" (a paper route), but he blows all three. Finally Louis comes up with his own brainstorm, a dogsitting service. Louis fills the house with canines who run wild and drive Ren to distraction, but when he comes up one dog short at the end of the day, she rescues him by finding ""Poopsie."" Also, Donnie and Mr. Stevens get out the big old birdhouse they never finished. But when they start working together, they realize why they left it incomplete. Father and son don't get back on good terms until they take a couple of hammers to the project.
Episode 10: Easy Way
Ren is an organizer of the ""Beacon of Help"" fund-raiser, where people will work, walk, skateboard, etc. for pledges of money. Louis wants to find something suited to his talents which also might impress Tawny. He decides to ""doze for dollars"" and is scheduled to spend 48 hours in a bed in a department store window. He soon draws a crowd and news media, who dub him the ""amazing boy."" Ren is irritated that she does the hard work and Louis gets the attention. But Louis' fame proves fleeting when he's upstaged by a skateboarding dog. He also can't go to the ""Fun-tasia"" festival where Tawny is spending the day with Zack Estrada. Loius calls Tawny on the phone and admits he should have washed cars with her and Twitty instead of being selfish, but she can't hear him. Louis wants to leave the window early, but his malfunctioning bed threatens to swallow him up. Tawny realizes that Louis is more interesting than Zack, and she comes to visit him.
Episode 18: Movie Madness
Louis plans to make an entry in a local young people's film festival. He recruits Tawny and Twitty for his cast and Tom for his crew and they begin making his extremely low-budget space alien love story. Louis proves to be a fanatical and dictatorial film director, and after Tawny almost gets hurt on a cheesy special-effect shot, his cast and crew quit en masse. Louis finishes the film alone and shows ""Three Eyes Wide Shut"" at the film festival, where it plays to great laughter from the audience, especially in the scene where Louis has his arms wrapped around himslf pretending to be two people kissing. Louis is humiliated, but Tawny at least will stand by him after the film's showing.
Also, Ren is ready to tell Bobby Deaver that she's interested in him, much to the delight of school gossip-monger Ruby. Ren practices her lines she's going to use on Bobby, then writes them out. Ruby mistakenly gives the note to Bobby. Ren is frantic to get the note back, but it turns out that, rather tha
Episode 9: Scrub Day
The 7th graders are terrorized by the approaching of ""Scrub Day,"" the day when the upperclassmen are supposedly allowed to do terrible things to them. Louis is desperate to find a way out of it, but Ren and Donnie offer him no help. Louis organizes the ""United Scrubs of America"" to stand up to Larry Beale, their chief tormenter. Larry thwarts them by saying that this year they will only concentrate on one scrub--Louis. Louis turns around to find that all his supporters have deserted him. On Scrub Day the patrol is out in full force seeking Louis, but he proves to be elusive for them. Finally they catch him, when who should show up but big brother Donnie. But instead of rescuing Louis, Donnie arrives dressed like Gandhi! (He's appearing in the Living History Pageant.) Donnie has taken Gandhi's philosophy to heart and advises Louis not to fight back, then he gets a page and leaves. Beale and company take their prisoner to the cafeteria where they dump him in a vat of sloppy joe. Remember
Episode 19: Strictly Ballroom
Ren and Louis are both looking forward to Zack Estrada's party with anticipation and nervousness. Ren has told her friend Ruby that she's planning to make her move on Bobby Deaver at the party. Louis decides to go when Tawny and Twitty say they're going, but he's afraid because he can't dance. He goes to Betty London's dance studio but all she teaches him are the rhumba, cha-cha, etc.—dances that he doesn't think will impress Tawny. Ren is mortified when she hears Louis will be at the same party as her and Bobby. She stipulates all sorts of no-contact rules for Louis to follow. At the party, Louis is too shy to ask Tawny to dance. Ren's attempts to hook up with Bobby meet with disaster. First her hair gets caught in a houseplant, then her foot gets stuck in the toilet. Louis is amused with his sister's plight at first, but he senses that Bobby is as important to her as Tawny is to him. To help her out, he creates a distraction by doing the tango with Mrs. Estrada, which impresses Tawn
Episode 8: Family Picnic
Louis is dreading his father's law firm's family picnic because Steve Stevens is determined his family will win the picnic's decathelon for the third year in a row. Loius tries to get out of it but the family legacy is just too strong. Louis doesn't prove to be much of a competitor, but the family is locked in a close race with the Austrailian family the Dandridges. Donny injures himself in an event, so Louis must participate in the deciding contest, the father-son kayak race. Seeing how much it means to his father to win and how much faith he's put in his youngest child, Louis ensures he'll win his leg of the race by drilling a hole in Quincy Dandridge's boat. After the family's victory, Louis is haunted by guilty feelings. At the dinner table the family all tell of some big accomplishment they made that day, then Louis reveals he cheated in the race. Ashamedly, Donnie, Ren and Eileen all admit they cut corners that day. Mr. Stevens feels as though it's his fault for driving the famil
Episode 20: Almost Perfect
Ren Stevens looks like a shoo-in for "Student of the Semester" and among her biggest supporters are Principal Wexler and two admiring young cub reporters, Carla and Marla, who are writing about her for the school paper. But the unthinkable could happen: in Mr. Rupert's wood shop class Ren may get a "C" on her final project. Louis helps her to cope with the possibility that she may have to accept less than perfection.
Meanwhile, Louis' locker has become a mess, and it's not all his fault this time, as a broken steam pipe is creating new life-forms in the muck. Principal Wexler gives him a dusty old janitor's closet as a temporary space, and Louis uses it to create "Casa de Fiesta", a spot which becomes as popular as Studio 54 among the students.