Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1544997
going to be engaging enough. But when I saw the final result, I relaxed in my seat and thought: 'This is going to work.'" The faded, uncomplicated backgrounds gave viewers the freedom to focus on what was happening with the characters. With The Lost Tapes, Quintel leaned into what had worked both for story and design. He wanted as many of the crew back from the old show as possible. They approached storytelling in much the same way, with lots of drawing games and creative brainstorming, and they found it interesting how the passage of time sparked fresh ideas. "After eight years of having these new experiences… I found that there were a lot of things I wouldn't have come up with back then," Quintel says. "We're all different people at this point [with] different relationships, family experiences." "These are not the same stories we would have told if the show had just continued," Jones adds. "But I think that the characters are still true to themselves." The same can be said for the look of The Lost Tapes, which harks back to the early days of the original, when boards were done on Post-it notes and Spence painted by hand. It took a conscious effort to maintain the "hand-drawn touch" Quintel valued. Spence, opposite page: Main characters Rigby (left) and Mordecai. this page: Sketches by Quintel and Szeles were done during writers' meetings as a rough visual development pass along with the outline and joke ideas, to show the board artists what the creators were thinking before they started boarding an episode. (top center and below) A statue commemorating Pops and the lost videocassette of Regular Show. S T O R Y & V I S I O N SUMMER 2026 17 who returned to real-life watercolors to create new textures, says that the old show had a limited palette on purpose, and "this is easy to forget when you have unlimited color choices and fancy digital brushes." She also notes that while many on the new crew had also been on the old show, reminders to stay the course were not uncommon, including: "Don't render so much." And yet, says Szeles, who is now an Executive Producer, for special sequences, design might be pushed to create a more cinematic look. This required what he describes as "a perfect threading [of] the needle." For example, they would go further than usual with the stylization of the lighting in a particular sequence to get the most out of the story—but only if it did not mean losing the humor. "There is a funniness to the crudeness, you know, and if you make things too beautiful, sometimes things become less funny," he says. While this deliberate mix of old and new techniques was used to maintain the loose vibe Quintel desired, he says that ultimately, "if you can fool me, that's fine." Throughout The Lost Tapes, it's a clever deception that serves the show's legacy. —Kim Fay Regular Show: The Lost Tapes images courtesy Cartoon Network Studios. All other artwork courtesy JG Quintel and Sean Szeles.