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Matt Maiellaro: We didn't. [Laughs]You were told it's over?
Maiellaro: We were told it's over. If it were our decision, we'd still be making it.How did that come on? Was it a big bummer, or were you relieved?
Maiellaro: It's actually quite shocking and a bummer at the same time.Just kind of out of left field?
Maiellaro: Well, I mean right field. [Laughs] The show does well, it generates a lot of revenue, it's not too expensive to make. So for them to let it go is just a bit odd. We call it odd behavior.
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Dave Willis: We had probably made half of the episodes by the time we were told, so we were able to do a finale that I think does justice to the series. I don't know if you can close out a show like this, the "will they, won't they" question that needs to be answered. But I think the finale we made is worthy of the show.Maiellaro: Worthy of an Emmy. [Laughs]Willis: Yeah, that's right.It is interesting how the show kind of resets in every episode. There's sort of returning things, but the narrative itself doesn't necessarily carry over from one show to the next, right?
Willis: Narrative's overrated.Maiellaro: Yeah, it's overrated. [Laughs] We just do fun episodes that reset. But it's chock-full of story for 11 minutes, right?So there are no ground rules, there's no "this has to happen"?
Maiellaro: No. Dave and I make all the rules and we just agree on which rules that we make and to do it.Willis: I guess we never explained why sometimes things hit the ground and just explode. We talked about doing an episode where the ground is made of gasoline. That seemed stupid.Maiellaro: So we just had men from the moon show up. Which is way smarter.When you're writing an episode, is it just generated from a random non sequitur like that? Like, "Oh we'll just have an arbitrary law like the ground is gasoline" and from there you turn on..?
Willis: No, no, no, no, no. Don't misunderstand me. The ground is definitely not made of gasoline. That was an idea that we just… We scrapped that idea when we decided it was dumb.
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Willis: We want to make something that we want to watch, and that's funny to us. I don't think we think beyond that. But you also want to try to do something different and unique every time. Maybe after 130 or however many episodes we've done, even if you do bizarre, non sequitur enough times, you've shattered the pattern. Non sequitur only works if it comes off of an established pattern, you know? So maybe you've fallen to your own traps. Intellectualizing it, you know. I just think we're trying to make something that's really funny, doesn't overstay its welcome, and makes us laugh. I feel like the past few seasons, but especially this season, is as strong as it's ever been. We've got a whole crew of guys, a small group of guys, that work really hard on it and take a lot of pride in it and I feel really good about them.
'Back when we started there was this whole rash of articles that said, "Will adults watch cartoons?" and I was like, of course they will if they're funny.' —Matt Maiellaro
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Willis: I don't know. I can't speak to anyone's reasoning why they would take it off the air.Maiellaro: It really comes down to guilt economics. When you have something that's incredibly successful that doesn't take any amount of effort or finances to make, you start feeling kind of guilty for America and so you pull back and you let other shows shine here and there. It's guilt economics. You make all this money and you're like, "Holy shit, this is too much money. We got to stop this for a while." It's kind of vulgar [to keep making all that money]. It's vulgar. Wise decision on Cartoon Network, for morale, you know.
Maiellaro: Yeah, just monopolize. You got to give other people a chance. [Laughs]Yeah, that's almost depressing. It's sort of a joke but it also makes me feel like it's true that something that's totally defined its own terms gets eventually killed almost for no reason and that's just the nature of the beast or something.
Maiellaro: I guess. We don't know. We've never been told, so that's what I assume. You're ripping off America with finances, you might as well just stop or you'll feel guilty about it and you're going to go to prison.Willis: America is getting ripped off. Let's make that clear.
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Willis: Crystal.So what happens to the universe…
Willis: There's a giant hole in it.What will fill the hole?
Willis: Vacuum of suck [Laughs]. As you know, nature abhors the vacuum. There'll just be a sucking hole.Maiellaro: When something you love goes away, you just get back together and think of something else.Willis: Yeah. But the good thing about cartoons is that they don't ever really die, even though they have been killed dead by the network. They don't ever really die. They just get rebooted. We're just going to wait around for the reboot.
Willis: Yeah, probably Carl will just move to Seattle and adopt a bunch of orphans and embark on a new career…Maiellaro: He'll get breast surgery so he can feed them.Willis: Feed them with his hairy, hairy breasts.
So, since you guys began this, and it changed, do you feel like your careers are as animators? Is that a viable thing that someone can do who wants to be an animator? What approach do they take now, as opposed to what you did 15 years ago?'We were the shortest show on TV and now we're like the longest thing on the internet. Now everybody wants to see something that's 12 seconds long.' —Dave Willis
Willis: I don't think either one of us would call ourselves animators. I mean, we just like to make stuff. I kind of came from wanting to do something that's comedy, and Matt is the same way, although he kind of came out from the horror angle. I'm not going to speak for Matt, but I kind of fell into this. I wanted to get into doing creative stuff. Honestly, making cartoons this way was working to my strengths, because I could just sit there in a room and just try to make it work until it's funny and not have to deal with the stress of trying to do it on a stage or anything like that. I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't have a degree in this. I just volunteered on shoots, hauling cables until someone would let me in the building. That's sort of how my career went.
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Willis: We told the stories that The Simpsons were too smart to tell. The internet is just full of absurdist stuff, that kind of humor is not that prevalent on TV, still. At some point this generation is just going to turn away from TV, I'm just wondering when the very last detective show is going to air on CBS, and if I'm going to have to work on it or not. You know what I mean?It's crazy, it's like every show these day is, "Who killed the white girl?" or "Who's fucking the white girl?" It's all the same.
Willis: We know some people that work at HON who always ask them if Nancy Grace ever found that girl.Maiellaro: Oh, in Aruba?Willis: "Did you guys ever find that girl?" "Which one?" "You know the one." [Laughs] No, not the one that fell in the well, the one that was betrayed by her boyfriend.Maiellaro: The one that fell in the well came out in the form of a haunted videotape.Willis: Oh, that's true. Don't watch that videotape. If you guys get sent one, don't watch it.