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Five Years Later

Hi y’all! Today marks the fifth anniversary of my first post in this project, and I wanted to thank everyone who’s read through it (again (again (again (again)))). This one is bananas, because I began this project to celebrate the fifth anniversary of Over the Garden Wall, and...yeah, here we are.

It's a humbling thing to compare the past five years to the five years before. Between 2014 and 2019, I went from unemployed and directionless to a career librarian with a fancy degree, which I thought was pretty nifty! Worth reflecting on through the lens of this cool show, because it was there for me at a low point and remained as things improved and faltered and improved and faltered and improved.

Buuuuuuuut between 2019 and today, I met and married my wife, saw more of the world than I had in my entire life beforehand, and became a father. Which is all and all, to put it mildly, niftier!

This autumn will be the tenth one in a row that's featured an Over the Garden Wall watch for me, the third for my partner, and the first for our little one. We might have to close kiddo's eyes for the scary bits, but I'm so excited to keep the tradition alive. I hope the same joy for y'all!

#otgw #over the garden wall #steven universally #housekeeping

Four Years Later

Hi y’all! Today marks the fourth anniversary of my first post in this project, and I wanted to thank everyone who’s read through it (again (again (again))). Life is good! Just hit my first year at the "new" library, and prepping for the annual rewatch with my wife later in the fall (adult readers: consider pairing the show with mulled wine). Time flies!

Fourth anniversaries sorta feel like a drumroll to the Big Five; after all, I wrote these reviews for the fifth anniversary of the show, meaning it'll be the Big Ten for Over the Garden Wall next year! But it's the length of a presidential term, the span between leap years, and your average stint in high school or college. Plus in just three months this blog will have existed for longer than the Confederate States of America managed, which really puts the racists who claim it as their Very Important Heritage in context. Wirt's Union jacket approves!

I hope today's readers have an excellent Labor Day weekend, and future readers can think fondly on excellent Labor Day weekend memories. As ever, take care!

#otgw #over the garden wall #steven universally #housekeeping

Three Years Later

Hi y’all! Today marks the third anniversary of my first post in this project, and I wanted to thank everyone who’s read through it (again (again)). Man, what a year! Got married to my favorite person, we're back in the East Coast, just started a new job, and this October said person and I will be watching Over the Garden Wall once again; it'll be my eighth autumn with it, and her second, although she's been wanting to rewatch all year because spoiler alert she's a huge fan. Even roped in a few of her friends to catch Wirt Fever.

Not much to report on show update terms. Patrick McHale co-wrote the upcoming Guillermo del Toro stop motion Pinocchio movie where the story takes place in Fascist Italy, so that oughtta be weird! It has, as always, been a blast to get the occasional notification that folks are reading the archives throughout the year. COVID finally got me for a spell despite vaccinations, but it didn't hit too hard and somehow my wife still dodged it, so I suppose my sentiment til next September is to keep safe and healthy and don't take those things for granted! And as always, take care!

#over the garden wall #otgw #steven universally #housekeeping

Two Years Later

Hi y’all! Today marks the second anniversary of my first post in this project, and I wanted to thank everyone who’s read through it (again). It’s also been about half a year since I wrapped up Steven, Universally over on the other blog, and hoo boy have those months been eventful. Got engaged, got a dog, and moved to a new city for the first time in my adult life, all while the pandemic still just sorta keeps happening. Makes a guy wonder what the third anniversary will be like.

The fiancée watched and loved Steven Universe (not a dealbreaker if she didn’t, she’s pretty terrific, but it’s a heck of a bonus) so I can’t wait to show her Over the Garden Wall as soon as things stop being stupid hot. As Florence Welch ostensibly says every September First, the dog days are over, so here’s to hot chocolate and sweaters in our near future. Take care, folks!

#over the garden wall #otgw #steven universally #housekeeping

One Year Later

“Dancing in a swirl of golden memories.”

Hi y’all! Today marks the anniversary of my first post in this project, and I wanted to thank everyone who’s read through it; I’ve gotten smatterings of notifications from this blog throughout the year, and it’s so cool to see folks enjoy it long after its completion. Only one major edit has been made since, and recently: with the passing of Joe Ruby in August, the introduction to Mad Love has been updated to note that he’s sadly no longer with us. Other than that, not much to add on the news front for a long-finished miniseries.

I hope you’re all doing well in a time where the unknown is scarier than it has been in quite a while. I structured Going Over the Garden Wall around two moments in my twenties when job insecurity fueled some of the worst depression in my life, and considering around half of the year since last September has occurred during a plague, I’m sure way too many folks now know how that feels. Every case is different, so I won’t pretend to understand what each individual circumstance is like, but if you’re struggling in the long term without knowing what to expect over the horizon, know that I’m rooting for you!

Over the Garden Wall won’t fix all your problems, but it’s times like this that I’m glad stories like it exist. Things might not always work out as well in the real world as they do in a cartoon, but even though it’s hard, I hope that when life is mucking up your path that you remember to eat your dirt. It might not taste good, but once you’re through it, life does get better. Good luck out there, and let this librarian know if you need any book recommendations to tide you over!

#over the garden wall #otgw #steven universally #housekeeping

Chapter 10: The Unknown

Life will always have its share of dirt. Mucking up situations that should be clean, obscuring the right path forward, piling up little by little until it threatens to bury you if you’re not careful. Part of growing up, maybe the biggest part, is figuring out what you’re going to do about it.

The Unknown presents two options. The first is sung by the Beast as he serenades Greg’s weakening form, heard as the Woodsman slowly enters the woods, first as purely diegetic music but soon joined by piano and strings:

“Sorrow and fear are easily forgotten when you submit to the soil of the earth.”

The second option comes from a surprising source, a character who never interacts with the Beast but whose advice is good enough that when push comes to shove, knowingly or not, Wirt takes it. It might not be phrased with the elegance of the Beast’s lyrical argument for surrender, but that doesn’t stop it from being Over the Garden Wall’s most important lesson:

#the unknown #over the garden wall #otgw #steven universally

Chapter 9: Into the Unknown

A boy named Mark was born on April 26th, 1976, fourteen years and one day before a boy named, uh, me. We’re both Virginians, but he moved to Florida as a kid while I stayed in the Old Dominion through college. Summers in Virginia are hot and humid and full of mosquitoes, which is why I love winter so much, but summers in Florida are so much worse. Despite that, Mark was an outdoorsy kid, and his adventures along the water inspired a literal dream he had around the time I was born about going on adventures across the seas, a dream that saw him start to make up stories about this alternate self. (I had nothing to do with it, we’ve never met and even if we had I wasn’t a particularly inspirational baby, but after so many introductions about animators of the past, it’s neat to think about how recently this last bit of history spans).

Mark moved to Utah in high school, and his swashbuckling appearance and attitude reminded his new classmates of Thorpe, Errol Flynn’s character in The Sea Hawk (as one of my sources helpfully notes, the reference to a 1940 film is likely due to the more conservative leanings of early 90s Salt Lake City making older films movies more popular). It’d be weird enough for “Thorpe” to become a lifelong nickname based on this tenuous connection, but the nickname Mark ended up with is actually a mispronunciation of name that I guess nobody felt the need to correct. High school, am I right?

Thurop Van Orman began his career in animation as an intern at Cartoon Network, and parlayed that into storyboarding gigs for The Powerpuff Girls and The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy. He learned from the likes of Craig McCracken as he honed his idea into a pitch for a show about a kid like him who loved capers on the high seas, and in 2008, the stories inspired by his childhood dream became a cartoon. For two years and three seasons, The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack not only entertained with its hilarious and surreal escapades, but incubated a crew of animators that shaped the 2010s.

J. G. Quintel, creator of Regular Show? Flapjack alum. Peter Browngardt, creator of Secret Mountain Fort Awesome and Uncle Grandpa? Flapjack alum. Alex Hirsch, creator of Gravity Falls? Flapjack alum (who brought Thurop in to voice the villainous Gideon). Pendleton Ward, creator of Adventure Time and Bravest Warriors? Flapjack alum, and his continuation of the Flapjack style of storytelling, where writers doubled as storyboarders, would shape Adventure Time alum Rebecca Sugar’s own methodology as she created Steven Universe. This would not be Thurop’s only “grandchild,” as the likes of Bee and Puppycat, Clarence, OK K.O., Summer Camp Island, and Infinity Train were all created from alums of shows created by Flapjack alums, and we’re even starting to see great-“grandchildren” like Craig of the Creek and Victor and Valentino.

But I left out one Flapjack alum who worked with Ward to develop Adventure Time from a viral short with a ton of potential into a sustainable television show, becoming the show’s creative director for the first two seasons. His name was (and still is) Patrick McHale, and in October of 2011, he started working on a pilot of his own.

#into the unknown #over the garden wall #otgw #steven universally #thurop van orman #the marvelous misadventures of flapjack #pendleton ward #adventure time #patrick mchale

Chapter 8: Babes in the Wood

In this last hurrah of explicit homages to animation of the past, the most obvious discussion point is Merrie Melodies and its ilk: Babes in the Wood is essentially a full-episode reference to the bouncing musical shorts of yore, where everything can sing’n’dance and the villain is a blustery bozo who’s defeated with a sight gag. If we expand to children’s entertainment in general, as we did with Greg’s Beatrix Potter episode, then The Wizard of Oz is our logical next step: the song welcoming him to Cloud City owes everything to Dorothy’s introduction to Munchkinland, complete with the fact that our hero has just entered a dream.

And look, there’s nothing wrong with talking about the obvious. But as we near the end, I think it’s a little more interesting to instead explore the very beginning. So let’s go back to a newspaper cartoonist in New York—the one who inspired fellow New York newspaper cartoonist John Randolph Bray to become an animator, which in turn led fellow New York newspaper cartoonist Max Fleischer to become an animator, because it turns out that just like the birth of superhero comics a few decades later, the birth of American animation hinged on print artists who dreamed big in the city that never sleeps.

A boy named Zenas was born in Michigan on September 26, 1871. Or maybe he was born there in 1869. Or maybe he was born in Canada in 1867. He said one thing, and a biographer said another, and census data says another, and I wasn’t there. It’s similarly unclear when or why he started going by his middle name, but by the time he took his first job at age 21 (or 19 or 17) as a billboard and poster artist in Chicago, he was calling himself Winsor McCay. They sure did know how to name ‘em in the 19th century.

McCay began his newspaper career as a freelancer, but moved to New York in 1903 to work for the New York Herald, where he wrote a variety of comics before hitting it big with Little Sammy Sneeze. McCay’s art was always brilliant, but his gag work was formulaic to a fault: the joke for Sammy Sneeze was always the same, he would sneeze and ruin everything right before the last panel. That devotion to formula would continue in his second big comic Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, where a fantastical events would occur for ever-changing characters before the lead woke up in the last panel, revealing it was a dream.

That second formula was the basis of McCay’s masterpiece. Already a successful cartoonist in the two short years since he’d moved to New York, his fame skyrocketed with Little Nemo in Slumberland, which used the same “wake up at the end” formula but with recurring characters and a running story. He toyed with the medium like none had before, playing with panel arrangement and innovating the portrayal of motion in comics, and his art skills only improved with this full-color strip. His success led to the vaudeville circuit, where he turned the act of drawing into a performance, and this combination of stage entertainment and his continuing comic work led him to seek new ways to dazzle the crowds.

By 1910, the earliest animated shorts had already started to emerge, and McCay was inspired by pioneers like James Stuart Blackton and Émile Cohl to try animating the characters of Little Nemo. Under Blackton’s direction, McCay singlehandedly drew around four thousand fully colored frames to produce his first animated cartoon, presented at the tail end of a filmed short about said cartoon in 1911. As mentioned, animated shorts were already a thing. But none of them looked anything like this. (If you’re concerned that there might be racist caricatures in it, don’t worry, there definitely are, McCay had a lot of strengths but overcoming garbage prejudices was not one of them).

The sheer quality of his work, continuing with the legendary Gertie the Dinosaur, directly led to the invention of the rotoscope as a means to mass-produce cartoons of similar finesse. The influence of Winsor McCay over animation as we know it is hard to overstate (and let’s stress again that this was his side gig, and he was just as influential over comic art): as crazy as it sounds, it’s safe to say that Over the Garden Wall would not exist if not for a story about the whimsical adventures of a little boy who traveled across a land of dreams from his bed.

#babes in the wood #over the garden wall #otgw #steven universally #winsor mccay #little nemo in slumberland

Chapter 7: The Ringing of the Bell

The history of animation that I’ve written about in these introductions can be more accurately described as the history of American animation. Which, sure, is humongous and revolutionary, but sticking to the States leaves out the first full-length animated film (1917′s El Apóstol, courtesy of Argentina) and the oldest surviving animated film (1926′s The Adventures of Prince Achmed, courtesy of Germany), as well as all the European predecessors to modern cartoons like the phenakistiscope or the zoetrope. But even that expansion limits us to the West, and although night has fallen on Over the Garden Wall, it’s time to look to the rising sun.

World War I shaped every aspect of global politics in the 20th century, and Japan was no exception. The Imperial Navy, already battle-tested in the Russo-Japanese War, developed into an unmatched force in the East whose influence lingered well after the Great War’s conclusion in 1918. A small part of that legacy was shaped by a boy born during the war, around the same time Max Fleischer developed his rotoscope. This boy, Katsuji, was fascinated with flight from a young age, and in another era, this might have led to a wonderful career in nonviolent aviation. Instead, the company Katsuji created in adulthood manufactured parts for the Zero warplane, which infamously attacked Pearl Harbor and launched the United States into World War II.

But this isn’t the story of how war turned a beautiful dream of flight into something twisted. It’s about how peace allowed a beautiful dream of flight to flourish into one of the greatest legacies in the history of animation. Because while 1941 might have ended with Katsuji Miyazaki’s creation leaving devastation in its wake, the year began with the birth of his second son.

Hayao Miyazaki was an artist from a young age, excelling early with detailed depictions of fantastical air machines but needing practice when it came to drawing people (spoiler alert, the practice paid off). He worked for cartoon giant Toei Animation out of college, where he met his lifelong partner in animation, Isao Takahata, and his lifelong partner in marriage, Akemi Ōta. He left Toei in 1971, but continued working with Takahata for a variety of studios, one of which allowed him to direct his first movie: The Castle of Cagliostro, a Lupin III movie that to this day proves that Miyazaki never needed the original characters or outstanding animation quality with which he’d become synonymous to produce an outstanding film. You don’t need to know a single thing about Lupin III to appreciate The Castle of Cagliostro, which I know because I didn’t know a single thing about Lupin III when I had my mind blown by The Castle of Cagliostro.

Still, Miyazaki had ideas of his own, one of which he developed into a monthly manga about a warrior princess with heavy environmentalist themes. In 1984, he worked with Takahata (alongside a composer Takahata found named Mamoru Fujisawa, better known by his stage name Joe Hisaishi) to adapt this comic, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, into a feature film. Something was clearly clicking, because the animators launched their own company with Hisaishi as an iconic collaborator: Studio Ghibli, named after a term for a hot desert wind that happened to also be the name of a WWII-era warplane.

The wind rose, and Studio Ghibli’s output soon became the stuff of legend: Miyazaki in particular has yet to make a film that isn’t spectacular. My personal favorite is Castle in the Sky, followed closely by that other movie about a warrior princess with heavy environmental themes, Princess Mononoke. But when it comes to influences on Over the Garden Wall, and particularly The Ringing of the Bell, it’s hard to see the story of characters lost in a strange world full of deception, with big-headed witches and hyper-specific rules for dealing with evil spirits, without thinking about the first Miyazaki movie I ever saw, back when I was young enough to be a little annoyed that I had to read subtitles: 2001′s instant classic, the startlingly magnificent Spirited Away.

#the ringing of the bell #over the garden wall #otgw #steven universally #hayao miyazaki #studio ghibli

Chapter 6: Lullaby in Frogland

Let’s look back. Way back. Back before the dawn of animation, before the dawn of film, well before Ruby or Spears or Disney or Iwerks or either Fleischer Brother. Back to 1835, in a town named Florida in a state named Missouri when a boy named Samuel was born.

Like Ub Iwerks, Sam was raised in Missouri. And like Max Fleischer, Sam’s family took a financial hit when his father’s work stopped (this time due to a premature death rather than the decline of tailory), giving Sam a practical approach to employment. He left school at age eleven to become a printer’s apprentice, then moved to his older brother’s newspaper as a typesetter and occasional columnist, writing humorous articles and drawing cartoons. But unlike Beatrix Potter or the animators we’ve covered, visual art wasn’t in the cards for Sam.

He moved to the East Coast to work for other papers, bouncing between cities before returning to the midwest to embark on a career he’d dreamed of since he was old enough to dream: piloting a steamboat. He thrived on the water, and kept writing about his work along the river, but everything stopped when the Civil War closed off the Mississippi. So Sam headed west to work for the same brother who once ran the newspaper, now a politician in Nevada (I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that this brother was for some reason named Orion). Sam tried mining, and it didn’t take, but he’d gotten pretty good at writing and set off for San Francisco to get back into his jocular brand of journalism.

It was here that he had his first success, a short story published in his paper called Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog. But, like a certain frog we’ve covered in this series, Sam wasn’t huge on permanent names. Within a month, the story was reprinted as The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Jim Smiley’s name was changed to Jim Greeley. Until the book version came out, when it was changed back to Jim Smiley. And this whole time, within the story, it’s a mystery whether Jim’s real name is actually Leonidas (it turns out that it isn’t, but it might be). None of this should come as a surprise for Samuel Clemens, who wrote under the names of Josh, Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, and most famously, Mark Twain.

#lullaby in frogland #over the garden wall #otgw #steven universally #mark twain #the princess and the frog

Chapter 5: Mad Love

So far, when going over brief histories of animators that have inspired Over the Garden Wall, I’ve written about pioneers like Ub Iwerks and the Fleischer Brothers (and maybe Walt Disney a little). Folks who were born well before cartoons on film were invented, and in some cases, before film itself was invented. By that metric, a story about two animators born in 1933 and 1938, both of whom were still alive when this post was first written, might not sound as impressive. But you don’t have to do something first to make a mark, and Joseph Clemons Ruby and Charles Kenneth Spears, two men from the first generation to grow up in the age of animation, mastered the art of converting the old into the new.

Ruby-Spears was founded in 1977, but came into its own in the 80s by producing the Alvin and the Chipmunk cartoon. Shows like this, based on preexisting material, were the studio’s bread and butter. Ever wanted to see a cartoon version of Mork and Mindy or Laverne and Shirley? A Mr. T cartoon? A Punky Brewster cartoon? A Police Academy cartoon? A Rambo cartoon? A cartoon called Chuck Norris: Karate Kommandos? Ruby-Spears had your back. Ruby-Spears brought video games like Q*bert and Frogger to television, and their penultimate production before shutting down in the 90s was the Mega Man cartoon. These shows varied in quality, to be sure, but just because something is derivative doesn’t mean it lacks value, as proven by the project that skyrocketed the careers of Joe Ruby and Ken Spears: while working for another duo, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, Ruby and Spears took a dime-a-dozen ripoff assignment and instead created one of the most iconic cartoons of all time.

Ruby and Spears began in Hanna-Barbera’s sound department, but soon became writers on Space Ghost (most famous now for its Adult Swim parody decades later, a show derived from an old cartoon that was itself derived into shows like Sealab 2021 and Harvey Birdman). While waiting on a meeting with Barbera, an agent mentioned that the head of CBS’s daytime programming was interested in developing a teen rock band cartoon to capitalize on the success of teen rock band cartoon The Archie Show, with the twist that these kids solved mysteries. Ruby and Spears leapt at the opportunity, working with the studio’s veteran character designer Iwao Takamoto to create five teens who solved teen crimes to appeal to a teen audience: Geoff, Mike, Kelly, Linda, and W.W. (in all my research, I never found out what those initials stood for). Because the Archies had a huge gluttonous sheepdog named Hot Dog to be friends with the rail-thin gluttonous Jughead, the band starring in the newly-christened Mysteries Five had a huge gluttonous sheepdog named Too Much to be friends with the rail-thin gluttonous W.W.—but don’t worry, Too Much stood out by playing the bongos.

Ruby and Spears could’ve left it at that, cashing a quick buck off the success of The Archie Show, especially because they frankly did just that later in their careers at Hanna-Barbera with shows like Jabberjaw. But for now, despite the Archie-ripping first draft, they wanted something more, and soon expanded the gimmick beyond just solving mysteries: these teens would solve spooky mysteries. Mysteries Five became Who’s S-S-Scared?, and to keep the horror from being too much for the kids, Too Much shifted from a sheepdog back to Takamoto’s first idea, a dopey Great Dane, one that was comically frightened of everything to subvert the image of a brave watchdog. Eventually the entire band concept was dropped, except for the part where the teens drove a tour van to visit new locations, and the redundant second male lead, Mike, died in the crossfire. The final step was changing the names of the heroes, because none of them were really working with this new version of the cartoon: Geoff became Fred, Kelly became Daphne, Linda became Velma, W.W. became Shaggy, and Too Much got a name inspired by Frank Sinatra’s scatting from Strangers in the Night: Skippety-Boo-Baw-Baw.

(I made one of those names up. Can you meddling kids crack the case?)

#mad love #over the garden wall #otgw #steven universally #scooby doo

Chapter 4: Songs of the Dark Lantern

In 1883, a boy named Majer was born in Krakow. The son of a successful tailor, Majer’s family moved to New York City when he was just shy of four. As was common for new immigrants, particularly Jewish immigrants looking to avoid the oppression of the Old Country (antisemitism sadly survived the journey the New World), his family took new names. His father Aaron became William, his mother Malka became Amelia, and Majer became Maximilian. Like just about anyone named Maximilian, he went by Max.

Max lived well off his father’s business in his childhood, but the Industrial Revolution was not kind to traditional clothing professions. By his teens, Max’s family was scraping by in Brooklyn, and the double whammy of poverty and the expectations placed upon any first-generation child created a work ethic that would last the rest of his life. While his natural gift for drawing led him to study at both commercial and traditional art school, the pragmatic side of him enrolled in a tradesman school as well.

Max got hired at a local newspaper, where he worked through a variety of jobs (including several in the photography department, another of his many interests) before settling in as a cartoonist. While he wouldn’t stay long, moving onto better-paying commercial work, his time in comics led him to befriend fellow cartoonist John Randolph Bray, who caught the animation bug in the 1910s and soon infected Max.

In the nineteenteens, large studios couldn’t compete with the much slower but far smoother techniques of a lone animator when it came to quality. But Max found a solution for that: combining his passion for art and photography with practical mechanical skills honed in tradesman school, he invented a specialized easel that made tracing over live-action footage frame by frame a breeze. Joined by his younger brother Dave, whose background in vaudeville and film production complemented Max perfectly, the pair soon found success with speedy, impossibly smooth animations made available by Max’s revolutionary invention: the rotoscope.

The brothers officially went into business together in 1921 after leaving Bray’s animation company, creating the Out of the Inkwell studio in New York. Their success continued through the 1920s, but a series of poor business decisions led to bankruptcy in January of 1929. This restructuring would be swift, and by March of that same year, they would found a new studio that would reach even higher heights through the 1930s, a company that finally bore their names: Fleischer Studios.

One of the stars of Fleischer Cartoons was a male dog named, uh, Bimbo. Max wanted to give Bimbo a girlfriend, and worked with Myron “Grim” Natwick—the same Grim Natwick who would later lead animation for the titular heroine of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves—to create a flapper poodle character. It made sense to give a dog a dog for a girlfriend, but it only took a year for her to transform into a human, one who for some reason was still dating the dog long enough for the Hays Code to get involved. Even censorship couldn’t stop her incredible rise to fame: Bimbo might have faded into obscurity by today, but despite her last cartoon airing in 1939, the world still remembers Betty Boop.

#songs of the dark lantern #over the garden wall #otgw #steven universally #max fleischer #betty boop

Chapter 3: Schooltown Follies

Since there have been stories, there have been stories that anthropomorphize animals. Folks have imagined creatures behaving as humans in every corner of the world, in myths and fables and fairy tales from ancient cultures to today. So by the turn of the 20th century, when a mycologist known for painting incredibly detailed images of fungus decided to instead write and illustrate stories about animals in contemporary clothes, it wasn’t exactly a new idea. But perhaps that makes it more impressive: despite the multitude of animal books for children that have been published in the last hundred and fifty years, the work of Beatrix Potter still stands out.

She’s not alone, of course: no good conversation about humanized animals in Western kid lit can last long without mentioning Richard Scarry or Margaret Wise Brown or Arnold Lobel. And Peter Rabbit’s extended family is quite British, which puts it at odds with the nostalgic Americana of Over the Garden Wall: it’s not for nothing that our assortment of animals in Schooltown Follies includes a raccoon and an opossum. But the timeless quality of Potter’s work is still felt in this episode in two ways. First, while the show has a cartoony lens, the school animals are far more anatomically accurate than Beatrice or the frogs of Lullaby in Frogland, evoking Potter’s signature field guide style. And second, there’s a mischief to Potter’s animals that makes them feel more like real children than the cute but bland residents of Scarry’s Busytown, and mischief is the name of the game when Greg comes to schooltown.

Schooltown Follies is full of clever tricks, but perhaps its most clever is introducing animals with human qualities (they wear clothes, play instruments, and walk on their hind legs) but not giving them voices. It’s generally great comedy fuel, showing the inherent ridiculousness of a school for sorta normal animals, but it more importantly allows the episode a silent movie feel, with plenty of physical humor enhanced by characters without dialogue. That style completes the episode’s subversion of Beatrix Potter’s oeuvre: she wrote stories about naughty animals learning that they should behave, but in this vaudeville version, the only way to save the day is by misbehaving.

#schooltown follies #over the garden wall #otgw #steven universally #beatrix potter

Chapter 2: Hard Times at the Huskin’ Bee

Ubbe Ert Iwwerks is not, despite the way it sounds when you say it in a dark room, an ancient and irreversible curse. It was the name of a boy born in Missouri in 1901, the sort of terminally Germanic name that makes “Ub Iwerks” maybe not sound so bad by comparison, so that’s what he went by when he started making cartoons.

Ub was just eighteen when he met a boy his age from Chicago at the Kansas City art studio where they both worked, and they became fast friends. They soon moved jobs together, becoming commercial illustrators at the Kansas City Slide Newspaper Company, but as technology advanced, the opportunity to make drawings come alive seemed too small for ads. Ub’s friend decided to jump into this new medium, and Ub followed suit, becoming the chief animator for Laugh-O-Gram Cartoons when he was twenty-one.

Laugh-O-Gram didn’t last very long, so Ub followed his colleague to Los Angeles to develop a series starring a live-action girl and a cartoon cat called the Alice Comedies. It was a moderate success, enough that Ub was tapped to design a character for Universal Studios to star in a new series of shorts. He created a cartoon rabbit that Universal loved, but big business being big business, the studio hired away most of the staff behind these cartoons, leaving Ub and his friend-turned-colleague-turned-boss high and dry. Determined to never paint another cel with a character he didn’t own the rights of, Ub’s boss roughly sketched out a new critter that Ub perfected and animated in a series of new cartoons.

(To be clear: by “animated,” I don’t mean he just directed animation or drew storyboards. Ub literally hand-animated the whole darn things, churning out cartoons at almost full-studio speed pretty much by himself.)

Anyway, the first such short his studio released, but the third produced, was called Steamboat Willie. And while it helped put Ub’s boss Walt and their character Mickey on the map, Ub would never see the same level of success. Because a big part of the story that I haven’t mentioned yet is that Walt, for all his incredible creative vision, wasn’t a tool so much as a toolbox.

Ub Iwerks would soon animate the very first Silly Symphony in 1929, The Skeleton Dance, featuring a growing group of skeletons emerging from a graveyard to, well, dance. Less famous is its 1937 sequel, animated by Iwerks after leaving Disney’s toxic work environment seven years earlier. Skeleton Frolic shows just how quickly the medium was evolving, featuring full color and far smoother animation. Ub would keep honing his art for the rest of his life, outliving his old friend by a few years but remaining a background figure in history despite his gigantic role in the founding of the most prominent entertainment empire in the world.

So while it’s laughable to imagine that a trained animator like Pat McHale would be unfamiliar with the iconic Skeleton Dance, it’s less of a given that Skeleton Frolic floats too high in his reference pool. I honestly don’t know either way for sure, but while Skeleton Dance is the classic, only its sequel features a moment where a skull is replaced with a pumpkin.

#hard times at the huskin bee #over the garden wall #otgw #steven universally #ub iwerks #skeleton dance

Chapter 1: The Old Grist Mill

2014 was a rough year.

I’d moved to New York City two Septembers earlier, fresh out of college and looking to break into children’s publishing. I took a job and made a healthy work family at a small children’s bookstore, and scrambled through internship after internship, working six- and seven-day weeks, until I finally became an editorial assistant in March of 2014.

Despite being where I’d worked my ass off to be, doing what I’d moved from Virginia to New York to do, I was deeply unhappy and the job wasn’t clicking. Considering I trudged through a depression in my teens that thinned in my early twenties but never went away, I figured it was something wrong with my head. It would be a year or so before I realized the bigger problem was that I love talking with kids and parents about books, and I don’t love working in an office environment. Either way, I didn’t last six months.

On the first of September, exactly five years before publishing this post, I moved out of my apartment (where my half of the rent had jumped $200) to couch surf while job hunting. I’d dragged all my stuff into storage during August, by far the worst month in New York, and was free to settle into a new phase of broke and grieving. I still thought I wanted to do publishing, deciding that the place where I’d worked was the problem rather than the career itself, but applying to jobs had been brutal enough without the shame of absolute failure to go with it. I still tried, but as is typical for anyone seeking a job in publishing, was met with total silence.

I only had one thing to look forward to. That June, while I was still employed, I’d nabbed a weekend ticket to my very first Comic Con, and despite having run out of money for non-essentials by October, the ticket was already bought. I spent three days taking my mind off everything wrong, and it will probably always be the best convention experience of my life. Super Smash Bros for 3DS was one of my last indulgences, and here were nerds galore to play with in lines. I saw the legendary Andrea Romano talk about her career as a voice director, then Kevin Conroy, one of her greatest performers, at a panel celebrating 75 years of Batman. I was one of the first people to see Daredevil, presented by producer Jeph Loeb, so on top of watching an amazing first look I got to see the writer of The Long Halloween, the greatest Batman story ever written (Loeb is very far from perfect but it was still a hell of a thing). I made Scott Aukerman chortle at a Comedy Bang Bang panel, and got hooked on the Thrilling Adventure Hour right when I needed hours upon hours of free entertainment the most.

In the middle of it all, I checked out a Cartoon Network panel; it was right after Mirror Gem blew up Steven Universe, so I was pumped to see some of the crew and a preview for Island Adventure. But this was one of many shows to be featured, and after Steven Universe and a clip from an upcoming Adventure Time, the lights dimmed further, and in a hushed room of hundreds, I saw my first two minutes of Over the Garden Wall.

#the old grist mill #over the garden wall #otgw #steven universally

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