Lincoln and Clyde set out to win a Rip Hardcore contest, excited at a chance to hang with their hero, only to learn that Lincoln’s real hero has been by his side all along.
Synopsis[]
Act I[]
Lynn Sr. is in the kitchen and making marinara sauce for his lasagna. Lincoln comes over and explains he's writing a paper on his hero, wanting to ask Lynn Sr. a few questions. Assuming Lincoln's hero is himself, Lynn Sr. comes down to the basement to collect items from his past. At the same time, while doing the family's laundry, Rita discovers a coupon for a free massage at the Royal Woods Spa, much to her amazement.
Lynn Sr. meets up with Lincoln in the dining room, where Lincoln explains that his hero is actually Rip Hardcore, and the essay is actually for a Rip Hardcore contest. Said contest's winner gets to spend an entire day with Rip, doing all items on a list of macho activities, including scaling Mount Deathpeak, and reading their essay on his show. While Lynn Sr. agrees to assist, Lincoln adds that Clyde is joining, too, and they need to be at the contest by 4:00. However, Lynn Sr. also needs to retrieve the tent and get it set up. After four hours of sleep, Lynn Sr. wakes up at 3:15 AM, retrieves the tent from the attic, and carries Lincoln's sleeping body to Vanzilla for the long wait.
Meanwhile, Lori is at the Green Tee Golf Course to get ready for the Great Acres Regional Championship. Her rival, Taylor Wedge, arrives and makes Lori so nervous she forfeits the match and drives back to the Loud House, where Rita is about to leave for the massage. Lori claims to Rita and Lynn that she is simply back because it is raining at the golf course. Rita's trip is delayed when Leni arrives and informs them her sunglasses are missing, forcing the other three to help.
Lincoln and Clyde win the Hardcore Hero contest and return to the Loud House, whooping and hollering in their victory, while Lynn Sr. has collapsed at the steering wheel from exhaustion.
Act II[]
At the living room, Lincoln and Clyde eagerly anticipate the arrival of Rip Hardcore. However, they are instead visited by an impersonator, much to Lynn Sr.'s dismay. As Rita enters Leni's room to find Leni's sunglasses, Lynn Sr. confronts the impersonator outside the Loud House, but the impersonator simply drives off.
Lori accidentally finds Luan's joke glasses in the living room, and when Lynn calls her out on it, she simply leaves in frustration, leaving her phone behind. When Lori's phone rings from a call from Taylor, Lynn picks up and learns the truth of why Lori left the match. Lynn promises Taylor that she will help Lori regain her determination.
Disappointed by the impersonator, Lincoln and Clyde sulk in the bathtub. Seeing the boys in trouble, Lynn Sr. becomes Dad Hardcore and declares he will help them finish Rip's list.
Lori searches for Leni's glasses underneath Lucy's bed and discovers a certificate ostensibly congratulating Lynn for breaking Lori's record at Green Tee Golf Course. This drives Lori to practice house golfing with Lynn's help.
Lincoln, Clyde, and Lynn Sr. participate in the activities mentioned on Rip's list. Eventually, they exhaust all items except for scaling Mount Deathpeak, but Lynn Sr. is completely exhausted and delirious. The real Rip Hardcore then arrives to begin the list.
Act III[]
As Lincoln and Clyde complete the list with Rip Hardcore, Rita calls the spa in an attempt to push it back an hour. Leni rummages through her clothing in the attic and finds her old dairy and handbag, forcing Rita to hang up in disappointment. Lori finishes her golf training, motivated by a hallucination of Taylor, and returns to the championship. With Leni taking so long to find her sunglasses, Rita reluctantly prepares to destroy her coupon, only to find Leni's sunglasses in her handbag, having put it in there while folding the laundry. She informs Leni of the good news, and Leni decides to give Rita a massage in thanks, using the latter's old Muscle Buster. While Lori completes the championship, Lincoln and Clyde return from climbing Mount Deathpeak to find Lynn Sr. unconscious.
That night, the family gathers to watch Rip Hardcore's show. Lori reveals that Lynn had actually forged the certificate and thanks Lynn for getting her confidence back. On the TV, it turns out Lincoln's letter is actually about Lynn Sr., which drives Lynn Sr. to tears. This moved Rip Hardcore enough that he walked off set stating "I got to call my dad".
This episode is available on the "Season One" DVD.
Trivia[]
This is the first episode to premiere on the same day as another episode (in this case, "Spelling and Doorbelling").
This episode reveals the following:
Prior to this episode, Rip Hardcore was Lincoln's hero, though Lynn Sr. thought it was actually him. He eventually became Lincoln's hero during the events of the episode.
Lynn Sr. had a friend named Gary in college, and he earned the varsity letter R for attending all of his games.
The first time Lincoln watched the Rip Hardcore show, Lynn Sr. watched it with him.
Several things are revealed by the list of activities that the winners of the Hardcore Hero Contest will do with Rip Hardcore:
Rip Hardcore has a Special, Secret survival smoothie, which contains sawdust.
Rip Hardcore can scale Mt. Deathpeak.
Rip Hardcore can eat a 2x4.
Rip Hardcore is apparently strong enough to lift a car.
Rip Hardcore can box a kangaroo without boxing gloves.
Rip Hardcore can outrun a cheetah.
Rip Hardcore's head is strong enough to smash a brick.
Rip Hardcore is light enough to mount himself atop a reindeer.
Rip Hardcore can wrestle an alligator.
Rip Hardcore can knock down a tree with a karate kick.
Rip Hardcore can survive a hike to the North Pole.
Rip Hardcore knows how to break out of a closed garbage truck.
Rip Hardcore has an aunt who has recently been hospitalized.
Prior to this episode, Lynn Sr. did not know how to set up a tent.
One of Fairway University's rival colleges is called Smacktauk University, and one of its top golf players, Taylor Wedge, detests Lori. They used to be rivals until Lori chickened out and left one of their matches.
Fairway University's equipment manager is named Rain.
The fastest time Lynn has ever sprinted from the Loud house to the water tower and back is fourteen minutes.
Leni considers her sunglasses to be one of her defining aspects, and she considers them to be her best friend who lived on her head.
One time, the Loud family went to a restaurant, and Lori choked on the food she was eating, which attracted everybody's attention.
Leni got her ears pierced without her mother's permission.
This further reveals that both of her parents have forbidden her to get piercings, as the Loud House episode "Job Insecurity" also reveals that Lynn Sr. forbids her to get her belly button pierced. However, seeing as how she wears earrings in the animated series, Rita has not seemed to mind.
Lincoln is not strong enough to lift the table next to the couch with his bare hands.
Leni always sets her alarm clock to go off at a time after the sun rises, but she wakes up when the sun rises instead of when it goes off.
Lincoln can bench-press 1,000 lb., but Lynn Sr. cannot.
Leni has a diary.
Leni tends to lose many things, as in this episode, she lost her sunglasses and found her favorite scarf, her diary, her favorite handbag, and two designer glasses that she bought at the mall.
Rita has a muscle buster, which she lost prior to this episode (although Leni recovered it while searching for her sunglasses).
Rip Hardcore's father is still alive.
The activities that the winners of the Hardcore Hero Contest get to do when they spend a day with Rip Hardcore:
Drink Special, Secret survival smoothie
Hardcore feats of strength
Hardcore defense
Hardcore bear challenge
Scale Mount Deathpeak
Clyde considers this to be the most hardcore activity of them all.
Of all the activities on this list, the only ones that were shown on-screen were drinking the Special, Secret survival smoothie, the Hardcore feats of strength, the Hardcore defense, the Hardcore bear challenge, and having a staring contest with a wolf (the latter being one that Lincoln and Clyde did with Rip Hardcore, rather than Lynn Sr.), although hydrating and scaling Mount Deathpeak were mentioned.
This is the first episode to have David S. Rosenthal as a consulting producer.
One of the activities for the winners of the Hardcore Hero Contest is outrunning a cheetah. In real life, the fastest speed a human has ever run is 27.79 miles per hour, a record set by Usain Bolt in 2009, which is slower than a cheetah's average speed of 40 miles per hour.
This is the first Really Loud House episode to acknowledge Lincoln being twelve years old in the dialogue. However, he was confirmed to be twelve years old in the series premiere, "The Macho Man with the Plan", as a marking of his height at age 12 can be seen on the wall in that episode.
Eva Carlton considers Leni's tank top and asymmetrical skirt from this episode to be one of her two favorite outfits from the series, with other being an outfit from No Louds Allowed.[1]
Before the Rip Hardcore impersonator arrives, Lincoln proclaims that he and Clyde will be the toughest guys in Royal Woods, possibly alluding to the Loud House episode "Roughin' It", another episode where they tried to prove themselves to be tough guys with inspiration from Rip Hardcore.
This is the first episode to physically feature a Loud family pet besides one of Lana's pets (in this case, Fangs), as Cliff made an off-screen appearance in "Heart and Soul".
This is the second time that Rip Hardcore has been at the Loud House, after A Loud House Christmas, in which he drives over the lawn while chasing Lincoln and Clyde's Sharkodile. He would temporarily move in later on in Season 2's Get Out of Dodgeball.
Innuendo:
The camera pans up as Lynn rips off her pants.
When Lynn Sr. threatens the Rip Hardcore impersonator by giving him two options, the second option, namely getting run over by the impersonator's car, is a life-threatening one that could kill him.
While searching under Lucy's bed, Lori finds Fangs and assumes him to be fake before discovering that he is real.
During the staged Hardcore defense activity, Lincoln's Rip Hardcore dummy kicks Lynn Sr. in the crotch.
Irony:
Lori saw through Taylor's attempted distraction where she proclaimed, "Your socks are untied!", knowing that this could realistically only apply to her shoes.
Leni states that she set her alarm, but she woke up before it went off because of the shining sun.
Lincoln and Clyde were promised a visit from Rip Hardcore, but when "Rip Hardcore" showed up, it was actually an impersonator, and Lynn Sr. later found out that there was some fine print on his contract which stated that the winner of the Hardcore Hero Contest would receive a visit from either the real Rip Hardcore or "an employee who bears his likeness". Lynn Sr. also made an effort to give the boys the feeling that they're spending the day with Rip Hardcore, but ended up not being as skilled as the real Rip Hardcore. However, the real Rip Hardcore soon showed up when they were about to scale Mt. Deathpeak.
Lori came home under the excuse that Rain, the equipment manager, canceled the match between Fairway University and Smacktauk University. However, Lynn soon discovered over a phone call that she lied about it.
After Lincoln and Clyde finished the Hardcore feats of strength activity, Clyde asked him for the next activity on the list, despite the fact that they were doing the activities out of order. Lincoln even ended up telling that the next activity on the list was hydrating, which was much farther down the list compared to the Hardcore feats of strength activity.
When Rip Hardcore began spending time with Lincoln and Clyde, Lincoln told Clyde, "We're hanging with Rip" when they did the Hardcore feats of strength activity. This phrase applied in both the figurative and the literal sense, as they were being used as the weights for the barbell that Rip Hardcore was lifting over his head.
Rita hears Leni exclaim, "My glasses!" from inside the basement, only for it to turn out that instead of her sunglasses, she recovered two designer glasses she bought at the mall. However, soon afterwards, Rita recovered Leni's sunglasses by finding them in her purse.
Rita's search for Leni's sunglasses, which caused her to miss her free massages at the Royal Woods Spa, happened because when she was taking out stuff from her kids' clothes, she found Leni's sunglasses and placed them in her purse, not realizing that it was her fault she missed her massage.
Despite Rita recovering Leni's sunglasses from her purse, she lied that she found them under the kitchen island, which Leni believed because she is dumb.
Despite Lincoln winning the Hardcore Hero Contest, the paper he wrote about his "hero" ended up being about Lynn Sr. instead of Rip Hardcore.
References[]
Home Is Where the Hero Is - The title of this episode is a pun of the phrase "home is where the heart is", which means that your home will always be the place for which you feel the deepest affection, no matter where you are.
When Leni told Rita and Lynn that her glasses were there when she got her ears pierce, Rita looked surprised as Leni tried to cover up the fact that she got her ears pierce without Rita's knowledge, despite the fact in the animated series, Leni is shown to wear earrings.
During the ad for Rip Hardcore's Hardcore Hero Contest, the word "asleep" on "Kiss your own muscles til they fall asleep" in the list of activities that the winners will do with him is misspelled as "aslee".
When Lincoln, Clyde, and Lynn Sr. begin drinking Rip Hardcore's Special, Secret survival smoothie, the text on the screen calls it the Super Secret survival smoothie.
Videos[]
The Really Loud House Promo - June 15, 2023 (Nickelodeon U.S.)
Lynn Sr. Becomes Lynn Hardcore! 💪 - The Really Loud House - Nickelodeon UK-2
