EPISODE 2: BEHIND THE SCENES

Title: Gireaglionus Maximus

Length: 12:35

Debut: August 21, 2003

Episode 2 had an interesting production cycle. The original idea for the episode didn't resemble the final story in any way. In the original conception for the story, the neighbor character was actually a hippie who comes to Monito's door asking for him to sign a petition to save the rainforest or something. Essentially we were going to make fun of those people who say "Did you know an area of the Amazon rainforest the size of a football field is destroyed every second?" by having Monito counterargue that if that were true, the entire rainforest would be gone within a matter of days. The conversation would go back and forth between Monito and the hippie, and essentially the whole episode would just be our outlet for making fun of tree huggers.

This storyline ran into a few problems right off the bat. For starters, we did a little research on Google, and it turns out that if the rainforest is being destroyed at a rate of a football field every second, it would take 20-30 years for the whole thing to disappear - long enough time to be realistic, but still short enough time to be a pretty scary prospect. Yikes. So much for that witty counterargument from Monito.

But the even bigger problem with the original storyline for episode 2 was that, well, it just wasn't very funny. It was funny when we had it in our heads, but when we tried to drag it out into a full story, we couldn't really come up with any jokes.

What made matters even more crazy was that we only started working on the animation and soundtrack for the second half of the episode after we were already over two months into production on a three month schedule. This was due to the fact that we devoted all of our time into the Gireaglion fight sequence at the beginning, polishing it and making it look as good as possible (though to this day I still say it could've used more work.) So at the last second, with literally two weeks until the episode had to be released, we changed the story entirely, and turned the hippie character into Monito's neighbor. This allowed us to come up with a bunch of random jokes that wouldn't have to rely on one premise. We took the drawings that John had already made for the hippie character and just synched them up to the new dialogue we had written and came up with the entire second half of the story within a week or two.

The idea of Monito having a gigantic spotlight pointed perpetually at his neighbor's window was based off of a conversation I had with Ted Kelly a long time ago (God only knows what prompted that whole conversation, but it was pretty funny) and the idea of having the neighbor eat brownies laced with hallucinogens was just a cool idea I had that I thought would be funny. The "Open Your Mind" scene that follows during the neighbor's trip-out sequence was, of course, a reference to the movie "Total Recall."

We decided to wrap up the episode with a monologue by the random wizard character. It's actually a cameo appearance by the wizard from "The Three Billy Goats' Gruff," the clay animation short my older brother did when he took the class as a freshman.