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, 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]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, 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.
