Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1544997
When a TV series comes to an end, it's common to wrap up the story. After an eight- season run in 2017, Regular Show did just this. A main character, Pops, was killed off, and an extended montage let viewers see what happened to the remaining characters over the next 25 years of their lives. Conclusive, indeed. So why did the show's Creator and Executive Producer, JG Quintel, want to bring Regular Show back? In fact, it wasn't on his radar. He was developing a couple projects at Cartoon Network when he was asked if he'd be interested in reviving Regular Show. Uncertain, he reached out to Sean Szeles, who had worked on the series as a Board Artist, Supervising Director, and Co-EP. Szeles says they were "very hesitant about this from the get-go because we made eight seasons, and we made a movie, and we wrapped up the show in this epic way. What's there to gain from doing more?" Still, they played with ideas, ultimately arriving at the series' final scene. In it, IN BRINGING REGULAR SHOW BACK TO LIFE, TAG MEMBERS RETURNED TO THE SERIES' SIGNATURE HUMOR AND UNDERSTATED ART. KEEPING IT REAL KEEPING IT REAL KEEPING IT REAL KEEPING IT REAL S T O R Y & V I S I O N the screen goes static, a tape labeled "Regular Show" ejects from a VHS player, and viewers hear an afterlife Pops declare: "Jolly good show." What, Quintel and Szeles wondered, if there were more tapes? Lost tapes, perhaps? A lot of the appeal of Regular Show: The Lost Tapes was that they could return to the old world they had created, rather than having to pick up where the series left off. It was a world Quintel originally came up with while working as Creative Director on The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack, when Cartoon Network's Cartoon Institute was looking for shorts. Having worked on shows with what he calls "cartoony sensibilities," he wanted to create a friendship show that was grounded in reality but could be pushed into surreal spaces. Using characters from Quintel's previous student film, Regular Show would have a low-key storyline, about a pair of twentysomethings—Mordecai the blue jay and Rigby the raccoon— who work as groundskeepers at a park. Once the show was given the green light, he asked the writers to "write as if you're talking to your friends." Regular Show was premise driven and did not have scripts, "so everything was based off an outline," says Toby Jones, a Writer and Board Artist on the original series and Supervising Director on The Lost Tapes. "The whole point was to be funny." Quintel, who is the first to admit that he is not a great artist, adds that some of the boards that got the biggest laughs were not drawn on model at all. This inexact ethos fed into the overall look of the show, which he developed on the pilot with Art Director Paula Spence. Translating his vision for the style, color palette, and atmosphere, she says: "JG told me it was called Regular Show for a reason. We want it to look like everybody's life so they can imagine themselves here in this world with these weirdos." Spence recalls that without the bright colors and heavy design aesthetic she was used to, "I was actually worried during the pilot stage—that [it wasn't] 16 KEYFRAME