EPISODE 3: BEHIND THE SCENES

Title: Fungus Amongus

Length: 31:22

Debut: August 21, 2004

(Get ready for a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff here; I get more and more verbose as the episode gets fresher in my memory.)

"Fungus Amongus" was not only the longest episode in terms of the length of the episode itself, it's the episode with the longest production cycle. Although we didn't officially start animating anything until May 2004, we started working on the story as early as September 2003. Episode 3 is the first episode for which we actually had a script, and I think the difference in the writing quality definitely shows. We used a script rather than ad-libbing the entire episode for two key reasons: #1, John and I were both going to college at different places, and we needed a way to keep track of what happened in the episode through e-mail, and #2, episode 3 has a lot of foreshadowing for stuff that happens at the end of the episode (and, believe it or not, even stuff that's going to happen in episode 4, but you won't find out about any of that for a while) and we needed to make sure we didn't forget any critical dialogue that would become important in the story later on.

The original conception for the Shroomers actually began a long time ago, when I was playing Metroid Prime (of all things.) I was using the heat vision visor and looking at some giant alien mushrooms, and the mushrooms were glowing red and yellow while blue haze was coming out the bottom of the cap. One of our random pasttimes is creating ridiculously elaborate stories for videogames that don't really need stories. Our original ridiculous videogame story was the back story behind the game Super Monkey Ball, in which the monkey ball tournaments are real events that take place hundreds of years in the future using real monkeys, which actually die when you lose a game. The monkeys are prize possessions, like show dogs, and a champion Monkey Ball monkey can sell for thousands of dollars on the black market. The Monkey Ball trade also works like the gladiators of ancient Rome, however, and if a monkey survives an entire tournament it can win its freedom. We came up with a similar story for Unreal Tournament, where the game is a real tournament that takes place in the future. Yeah, we've got a lot of free time. So when we saw the crazy mushrooms in Metroid Prime, we came up with all the technical details of how they worked in real life. The Metroid Prime mushrooms (Saturnine mushrooms from Tallon IV) became the Shroomers, and those turned into the basis for episode 3.

Early versions of the script for episode 3 (which I still have saved on my hard drive) show a radically different story from the final version. The "Larry Swinger Show," for instance, was originally just an interview with Monito, a la "Inside the Actor's Studio", in which he explains how the mushrooms work and how he obtained his billions of dollars. The beginning of the episode was going to start off with this, and Monito was going to introduce the Grout flashback we have at the beginning by saying "Actually, it all started a few months ago, in a galaxy far, far away..." After that, we changed it from a PBS documentary to a VH1 documentary called "Behind the Monkey." Then we changed it again when I got the idea of making it the "Larry Swinger Show." As admittedly corny as the title "Larry Swinger" is, it's actually an obscure homage to a video that John Kieres, Ted Kelly and I made freshman year in high school for a project in our history class.

After the Larry Swinger Show, Monito has a conversation with John Kimble, who is in reality nothing but an Arnold Schwarzenegger soundboard. We had the idea of some military guy stealing the mushroom for a long time, but originally there was only one guy, who was also the same guy Monito fights in the Big Action Sequence at the end of the episode. The idea of using the Arnold soundboard came to me after we'd already been working on the story for a long time, and I'm glad we decided to put it in. (This is why I like the fact that we waited for a whole nine months before beginning the actual production; the story ideas just keep accumulating over time and the story keeps getting better and better!)

The scene that follows the Arnold scene, "Go Go Fuku San," has an interesting backstory. Way back before I actually knew anything about animation programming, I tried to make a little animation project that was to be a parody of Dragon Ball Z. I chose DBZ for the same reason I came up with Monito; I thought that it would be easy to animate something where not a whole lot of stuff was moving around. Unfortunately, at the time (this was either my sophomore year or junior year in high school) the software I was using was a crude variant of the program I made for the intro to "Timmy and the Monster" and it wasn't nearly as powerful as CelMagic (the software I created for Monito) so I got frustrated with it and the project was scrapped. Fortunately for Monito, I kept all of the drawings I made for Go Go Fuku San, and that scene was simply a matter of re-scanning all of my old drawings into the computer. (If the drawings look a little crappy, it's because I did them years and years ago.) The name of the main character, "Fuku," was originally just a parody of the name "Goku" that sounds like a naughty word, but as I later found out it actually has two meanings in the Japanese language: 1) a schoolgirl's uniform, and 2) "to wipe." I swear, I can't make this stuff up. I had to get my sister's help for the opening title for Go Go Fuku San because I don't actually read or write Japanese. And here you thought that whole sequence was just a corny DBZ parody. See, isn't it more interesting when you have behind-the-scenes information?

After the Go Go Fuku San scene, a short conversation between Monito and Chiquita (a character who was in the background for episodes 1 and 2, but who never had any speaking parts until episode 3), and a short funny scene that we cut out of the episode entirely due to time constraints, Monito goes to church with Chiquita. The idea of having Monito go to church was in the story from very early on, but it was originally nothing more than John saying "Monito goes to church somehow, and a bunch of funny stuff happens." The hard part for the church scene was coming up with a reason for why Monito would go to church in the first place. The story we settled on, which I really like, is that Monito has to go because he's tagging along with Chiquita. Chiquita's mom was created solely as an excuse to put Monito in a church so we could do the scene. We cut one joke from this scene, which was a horrible pun involving the phrase "groin vault," but one thing from that joke that ended up in the final cut was the fact that the exterior shot of the church shows that it is indeed made from a groin vault. In early versions of the story, the point-of-view from Monito had the preacher saying "Bongity bongity bong bong" instead of the infinitely funnier choice of "Badger badger badger."

The "Monopoly Man" scene (in which Monito comes home to a dramatic Romero-style death of the Monopoly Man) is probably the most random scene of the episode. And believe it or not, we actually toned it down from my original idea, which was a lot more random and weird: In the original version I had in my head, after seeing Monopoly Man die, Monito says "Damnit, not again!" Then he pulls a random lever sticking out of the wall and a trapdoor opens underneath Monopoly Man. Monopoly Man falls down the trapdoor and a bunch of fire comes out of it. The rest of the conversation with Ribbet continues from that point. I still like this gag, but John vetoed it, saying it was too random even for Monito.

That scene is followed by a very obvious reference to the game Frogger (which everyone saw coming a mile away) and a parody of "Aliens." We had the idea of Ribbet running through the sewer while Monito looked at his progress on the radar for a long time (it was an especially easy dramatic scene to animate, because it's just a bunch of moving dots with dramatic music) but it wasn't until the day we actually started animating it that we decided on exactly what the alien thing was. Possible candidates for the alien included a kitten, a gigantic sewer rat, an alien, a Destructör, or just an unidentified scary thing that they destroy with a grenade or something. In retrospect, I think it would've been a cool idea if it had been the same monster from "Timmy and the Monster." But in the end, we decided to make it a little mouse.

After that scene comes the Break-in scene, also known as "The Big Action Sequence" or "The Money Shot." As with episode 2, we started working on the Big Action Sequence before we did anything else, so we could get it out of the way and work on the funny parts. We spent all of May and June 2004 working on the break-in scene and the mech fight, and then we started working on the next most complicated scene, which was the Grout flashback. (The Grout scene was incredibly complicated because of all the layers we had to put in, such as the transparent bubbles, and an extra layer for Grout's head which is now transparent. I'm glad we worked out that scene first, though, because after I got used to doing really complicated stuff it made the normal non-action scenes that much easier, and we played around with the camera angles a lot more in the rest of the scenes. Even simple shots, such as Monito and Orange Head watching TV, now include lots of panning and zooming.) For the Mech Fight scene at the end, we were originally going to have an animated 3D model of the mech which Monito would fight against. I even got as far as making a complete 3D model of the mech before realizing that it was a lot easier and looked a lot better if we just used two-dimensional animation. The mech itself still took a whopping 11 layers of animation due to the fact that each joint had to have its own layer. The music for the mech fight was originally going to be the Farbrausch song we used for the Virus intro (the soundtrack to "The Product") but I got inspired while listening to "Aerodynamic" by Daft Punk and decided to use that as the background music for the fight instead. The cameo appearance by Toad in the mech fight scene is an inside joke that everyone should recognize, from Toad's appearance as Princess Toadstool's shield in Super Smash Bros. Melee.

The "Trampoline" scene at the end was something we had in the story for a long time but didn't do until the very last day. We stole the joke (and, alas, the squeaking sound effect) from a similar joke in the show Futurama, but in that version it was robots instead of a trampoline. I think it's a nice way to slow down the pace of the episode after the Big Action Sequence and bring it to a close. I also think it's interesting that in that scene that are three different species (a frog, a monkey and an...orange head) talking about sex, but they each have completely different methods of reproduction.

Making the ending credits was an interesting adventure, because I was actually coding the program that renders the credits trying to fix a bug even as people were already showing up for the premiere. This was after we'd decided, a week earlier, that we weren't going to have the traditional last-minute crunch time on Monito. So much for that.