While at New York Comic Con 2015, creators of Cartoon Networks hit cartoon Regular Show, JG Quintel and Sean Szeles, as well as voice actors William Salyers and Sam Marin, plus art director Paula Spence, sat down for the Cartoon Network press block for a roundtable style interview, to talk about the show’s upcoming season but, specially their newly released filmed.
Quintel stated the idea behind a Regular Show: The Movie:
“We’ve done a lot of things on the show that are movie level epic in eleven minutes and it was really hard once we decided to make a movie, what’s worth making a movie. And one concept we had never explored was them not being friends [Mordecai and Rigby]. Like their friendship is the core of the show and so to break that up, which is what the movie deals with, is like the danger that their friendship could dissolve is like really intense.”
Regular Show: The Movie is canon, which Quintel addresses and happens shortly after season six, with season seven starting right after. Currently, Regular Show is still in season seven, with a recently released Halloween special, Terror Tales of the Park 5, then a seasonal special related to winter, on the horizon as well. With the season seven finale being a half hour special around December and season eight starting sometime in 2016.
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Another aspect that Quintel and Szeles touch on, was the process of their writers room and how they’ve come up with ideas for episodes, which generally reflect some kind of 80s theme or trope. Quintel said:
“We have methods for coming up with stuff. I mean, in our writer’s room, we play a game, it’s like a title game. Where you put a title to an episode, everybody puts a couple into a hat and then you draw the title out and for two minutes type an episode and then another one, another one, another one. Then in an hour you have like 150 episode ideas, which are all bad,”
With Szeles chiming in to say:
“All terrible,”
before Quintel concluded saying:
“But you find some gems in there and you talk about those gems and be like oh, this could definitely be an episode with Mordecai and Rigby or this could be a Skips episode, And we keep playing the game and finding those episodes that makes us excited. And we definitely have to throw away a lot more now, because it’s like nah, we already did that, we already did that episode. So, it’s harder the longer we go, but I don’t think we’ll ever run out of ideas.”
For those that don’t know, a lot of the Regular Show is based off of JG Quintel’s and Sam Marin’s (the voice of Pops, Benson and Muscle Man) time in college, especially the catch phrases like “ohhhhhhh” or “hmmph hmmph” which came from friends and playing video games. Paula Spence, actually goes into depth about how a lot of the artwork within the show, actually reflects this, stating:
“I think a lot of the show is based on JG experiences. I mean the first season was all about, with my artists, my art team it would be like hey I need a pickup truck and then our prop designer drew it and JG goes, oh no it needs to be a Ford F150 or you know whatever, cause that’s what my dad had it. I was like aww, you need to tell me this stuff. And then finally I decided we’ll just ask him, every time there’s a car,”
With William Saylers (voice of Rigby) jumping in to say:
“Cause he’s thinking of something specific.”
Spence continued:
“Yeah yeah, his own experiences. He worked in a movie theatre and going to school with Sam and a lot of it is based off JG. People come in with the ‘I’m Eggscellent Hat’ and they’re so excited, I’m like you know JG lived through that. And they’re like what!”
For the full roundtable interviews listen below. Regular Show: The Movie is available on DVD, Blu-ray, and most digital platforms.
