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Private Notes
Day-dreaming youngster Ned Flemkin smashes his piggy-bank to buy an exciting pet, but various costly distractions en route to the store leave him with only enough money for a newt... which is utterly unresponsive until Ned feeds him some Zippo Newt Food, and discovers he's created a fast-talking, morph-a-minute monster. / When Newton discovers that bashful Ned has a crush on the little girl down the street, he spares no effort—or embarrassment—to unite the pint-sized Romeo and Juliet.
Ned is happily building his class float for the annual Friendship Day Parade... until over-protective Newton finds out about a "competing" float, and turns Ned's humble effort into the Death Star on wheels. / When Ned's tattletale cousin, Renfrew, visits and gets Ned in trouble, Newton sees a way to discredit him once and for all, by turning Renfrew into "The Boy Who Cried Newt".
Ned's Mom throws out his rare Captain Ocelot action figure, so he goes to the dump with Newton and searches through trash for it. He comes home with the toy, a truckload of recovered treasure, and really bad-smelling shoes. / As Ned's Mom's birthday approaches, she admires a replica Sacrificial Peruvian Blood Altar Ring in a catalogue. "A replica?" snorts Newton, slapping an Indiana Jones hat onto Ned and handing him a whip. "We'll get her the real thing!"
Everyone knows the moon is made of cheese, so Ned and Newton convert the family station wagon into a spaceship to find out of Mars is made of tomato paste. / Ned wants to go to the school dance with Linda, but not wanting to be embarrassed by his poor technique, enlists master of all footwork Newton as his tutor.
Newton takes a simple 20-home paper route (which Ned got in order to save up for a bike), and turns Ned into the Rupert Murdoch of Friendly Falls. / Ned is asked by his one love, Linda, to go to the circus. So he saves his money, but it's a disaster. Newton goes backstage at halftime to do some serious pep-talking and give the circus owner his money's worth.
Sunday night, Ned wishes he could go back to Friday to enjoy the weekend over again. Newton finds a time machine in the attic. But when Ned and Newton step out of it onto an uncut lawn, they think they must have accidentally gone back to Thursday—until the first dinosaur walks by. / Ned attends a scout Jamboree, where Newton notices that some other kids have more merit badges than his owner. Not if he can help it….
The New Improved Zippo that Ned mistakenly buys makes Newton malfunction in some bizarre way, just when Ned's cousin Renfrew and his cat, Bundle, are visiting. Ned needs to find Zippo Classic... so he decides to go straight to the source: Mega-Brands Corporate headquarters! / Ned is set to perform in the school pageant, but his staff sponsor/dramaturge is a would-be writer who gives picky notes that slowly turn Little Red Riding Hood into "Mad Max and the Chicken-Wolf".
Newton fills in for the babysitter, and the Flemkins go out to dinner, asking Ned's Uncle Frank to drive by and check on Ned. Uncle Frank, on his way to a costume party as Frankenstein, sees Newton's big shadow and tries the front door. Ned and Newton, terrified by a late-night horror movie on TV, see the creature outside and decide it must be kept out of the house at all costs. / When Ned's Dad inadvertently deposits Ned's lucky penny in the bank, Newton decides to do the only sane and reasonable thing to help his owner: tunnel into the bank vault and go through every coin to get it back.
Newton overdoses on television, then decides to drastically improve Ned's life... using the hard-sell advice of 1,000 commercials as his guide. / Ned's on vacation with his Mom and Dad, passing the time with a dumb "Vehicle Bingo" game. When he gets left behind at a rest stop, he and Newton have to take every kind of transportation to catch up to Ned's blithely unaware parents.
A world record held in Friendly Falls since 1959 (and immortalized in local sculpture, lore, and song) falls to a foreign competitor. The town is distraught. Hiram Friendly offers a prize to anyone who can break a world record, any record, for Friendly Falls. Newton and 101-plate-spinning, 65-raw-egg-eating Ned to the rescue! / Ned's in the Friendly Falls Museum of Dusty Old Things with his class, moping about the scavenger-hunt-type questionnaire he has to complete before he can leave. Stowaway Newton finds some ancient Zippo in a Grecian urn... then finds a way of making the museum fun with his own unique version of history.
Newton watches a home improvement show, and decides Ned's tree fort could do with a little improving. Ned asks for—and eventually "borrows"—an entire subdivision's worth of wood from the construction site down the street. / Doogle's parents wonder aloud how his dog, Lummox, got fleas. "He just lies around. We have to get rid of 'em." But Doogle only hears this last part, and figures it's curtains for Lummox. Newton feels for a fellow pet, and pulls out all the stops to prove the mutt's worth.
Newton's not his normal self—something biological's going on, and he decides he's in love. But… with what? / Track-and-field day looms at school, with its promise of gold ribbons, and there has to be a sport in which Ned excels, but what is it? Newton becomes his coach and drags him through real (and ridiculous) sports, in pursuit of his true athletic calling.
Ned's parents get the flu, and Newton shows Ned that doing 100 household chores can be fun! Well… it starts out as a good idea, anyway. / Distracted by Newton running amok, Ned accidentally gets locked in the mall, and ends up being pursued by a crazed security guard.
Ned goes with his dad on Take Your Child to Workday, and while he initially thinks his dad's job is dull, he eventually thinks that his dad is a government spy, and tries to find out more information.
When Ned complains that he can't go to summer camp, Newton mistakenly thinks he's describing boot camp. He signs Ned up for the army, and while no one notices that he's 10 years old and insists he does basic training, Newton tries to find a way to get him out.
Ned decides to climb a small hill to raise money for charity, but Newton thinks he would raise more if he climbed Mount Everest, so he takes Ned there and helps him climb it.
Winter is coming, and Newton learns that newts hibernate during the winter, a process he doesn't want to go through. When he learns that birds migrate instead, he decides to go away for the winter and takes Ned along.
Ned and his family are all set to spend a weekend in exciting Gamble City, but when Ned's mother finds out there's gambling there, she decides to have Ned stay with his aunt and uncle instead, who is a depressed, puritanical Eastern European couple who think fun is unhealthy. As Ned and Newton become more and more bored, Newton decides to have the whole house shipped to Gamble City.
Ned was born on New Year's Day, and as such, is expected to play Baby New Year every year at a New Year's Eve pageant. He doesn't want to do it at his age, so he desperately tries to find out if another New Year's Baby has been born in the town, saving him the embarrassment.
Ned's been given a small role in a horror film "Car-Driving Trees of Egstappa Part 2", but soon finds out that the Car-Driving Trees are real, and plan to wipe out Friendly Falls.
Friendly Falls is experiencing a drought, which is ruining Ned's summer, and might cause trouble for the various newts in town when the ponds and rivers they live in dry up. Newton tries to end the drought with various plans to make it rain, and they succeed, even though it has been raining so much the town flooded.
Ned babysits a rich kid who has a female newt that ends up eating Zippo. / Ned gets a part time job at the TV station but Newton ends up destroying the tapes so they both must entertain the viewers.
Ned and his friends are collecting 10,000 bags of pet hair for charity, but Ned's cousin Renfrew wants to sabotage their efforts. Newton will have none of it, so he attempts to get Renfrew off their case.
The Friendly Falls Future Fair has been reopened after it was closed in 1964, which makes Ned excited. The lineup to get into the fair is huge, though, so Newton sneaks him in so they can see the exhibits. Ned is dismayed to see that they haven't been updated since 1964, and most of the displays are ridiculous: there's a car with a record player mounted on the dashboard for a "car stereo system", a kitchen where malfunctioning robots cook food, and even robotic pets (much to Newton's shock). He goes back to his parents just as they get to the front of the line, and says he doesn't want to visit the Fair anymore.
Ned comes with his parents on their anniversary cruise, but thanks to Newton, he ends up on the wrong boat.
At Ned's family picnic, Newton develops amnesia, and thinks he is one of Ned's obnoxious uncles.
Ned creates a diary but Newton thinks it's boring! So, when Ned goes to the farm, Newton tries to make the trip more exciting! / Ned starts doing fractions at school, but he doesn't know anything about them. That means Newton has to tutor him—but he ends up cutting himself in half!
Ned's class has started learning fractions, which Ned has difficulty with. To help him grasp the concept, Newton splits himself across the middle, but his lower half develops a mind of its own and tries to run away.
Ned joins Xylophone Camp but it's not all it seems. It turns out to be a club for kids to join when the others are full. Now Ned has to make people want to play the xylophone. / Ned has to do a school project and he wants to do it on the Bermuda Triangle, where stuff has been disappearing. Can he solve the mystery?
Ned sends in 20 cereal box tops to get a "Captain Ocelot Crypto-Claw" toy, but when it doesn't come for eight weeks, Newton decides to go and find it. After going through the company that makes it, they find out each of the toys is manufactured by a goat named "Inchina", and the box tops are meant to feed her as she makes each toy, which takes up to eight weeks.
Ned is excited to go to xylophone camp, but is dismayed to find out that no one there actually plays the xylophone, and that it's meant to be a camp for all the kids that couldn't get into "fun camps". After seeing that everyone is wasting their time on an electronic toy called the "Battery Drainer" because of its flashy commercial, Ned decides to create his own commercial to get the other kids interested in playing the xylophone.
Ned has to do a local history project for school, but all of the good topics are taken. He soon finds out about the Friendly Triangle, an area in town where things allegedly disappear. He gets several eyewitness accounts of paranormal events in the Triangle, but when he tries to investigate them, he finds out all of his witnesses were just from a family with very poor eyesight that lost their things, and that the Friendly Triangle isn't real.
Newton thinks that Ned and Linda are getting married. / After getting struck by lightning, Newton and Ned switch bodies.
Rusty McCabe is well-known around town as a snobby rich boy, but when Ned's photos get mixed up with Rusty's at the photo booth, Ned finds out that Rusty's family is broke. At first, intending to disgrace him, Linda instead convinces him to be sympathetic, and people start donating things to Rusty's family. They later find out that these photos were from a theme park called "Live Like Ordinary People Land", where rich people pretend to be poor.
Ned's parents all go up to a cottage in the mountains, owned by Renfrew's parents, for some "peace". Renfrew's parents, unfortunately, are foley artists, and decide to catch up on some work while they're there. Things are made worse when Ned has to deal with Renfrew some more and gets lost in the woods while trying to re-enact the stories of fictional nature hero Woodsy Foreston.
Ned ends up taking both Linda and a foreign student to the aquarium so, to fix the problem, Newton sets him up with every girl in school! / There's a new Furby-esque toy called Playbee, and Ned buys one. But there's one problem—the toys are really evil trolls trying to conquer the world!
Ned signs up for the school debate team to be closer to Linda, even though he's bad at public speaking. Newton helps him by passing him notes, and Ned becomes the school debate champion. He's so good, in fact, that he successfully debates in favor of the town mayor's ridiculous plan to replace all of Friendly Fall's streets with canals, to ease pollution.
Protecting his owner from burglars, Newton unwittingly attacks the Tooth Fairy, who puts a curse on Ned that makes his front teeth grow to the size of playing cards. / Ned receives help on a rigged scavenger hunt from Newton... and from a magical remote that doesn't work on televisions, but does seem to work on everything else.
When Ned and Newton accidentally bankrupt Friendly Falls, everyone he knows has to take a demeaning second job in neighboring Carty Garbageton to pay the town's bills. / Ned's classmates watch in stunned horror as he shows the film he made for Health class with (unfortunately) Newton's help.
