opinion: no series or story ever will ever have as perfect an intro as over the garden wall, and it does it in two lines and a song
you start with a frog playing piano. you are instantly intrigued. you get given a really cool intro song that plays perfectly on the notes of like, autumn nostalgia? it’s pretty and slow music, showing you images you haven’t seen before but the tone makes it feel like stuff you’ve forgotten, things on the tip of your tongue, rather than stuff that’s entirely new
we then have the narration, that’s like, storybook shit, you think ah yes i know where this is going, this is the feeling i was just having
this is furthered by the creepy but still fairytale style woods
and then we have greg’s first line which is literally just the list “antelope, guggenheim, albert, salami, giggly, jumpy, tom, thomas, tambourine, leg face mccullen, artichoke, penguin, pete, steve” and with every new word added you’re trying to guess what the fuck he’s listing and how this has anything to do with the setting you thought you knew, it puts you completely on the back foot but you’ve gotta find out what it is now
but nothing prepares you for the moment greg goes “but i think the very worst name for this frog is-” and that’s the kicker. bc it’s ridiculous and its funny and it tells a whole story and makes you look at the whole thing in a new light and sets an incredible tone for the story before we know anything about the characters or even reach a single plot point
(i mean otgw continues to live up to that tone and even surpasses it which is what makes it such a good series despite being so short but yeah nothing else pulls you in this quickly in quite the same way and i love it)
