Our second episode (and our first with our actual main characters in it) aired tonight, and people seem to dig it. I'm glad, because I'm always glad when people like one of these things, but also because I'm especially proud of this one--the finished script was one of my favorites, and it was a lot of fun to write...lo, those many months ago.

It was also, however, an absolute nightmare to make at just about every level of production. It had more backgrounds than any other episode, partially because all of our key Venture Compound backgrounds had to be re-designed and re-painted for HD, and partially because we revealed entirely new locations within the Venture Compound that we'd never seen before--like the lobby, hallways, conference room and R.O.C.C.--which would also become "key stock pack" backgrounds for the rest of the season...so they had to look nice because we'd be re-using them a lot.

Then we had some...problems...in the storyboarding phase that forced us to bump the show back one slot in the production cycle.

Then, when it came back from overseas several months later, we discovered that about half of it had been animated "on 3's"--which, if you don't know much about animation, means that there's only one drawing for every three frames of film--when American animation is usually done "on 2's." So it looked like anime; all stiff and ghostly, and those scenes had to be reanimated. If you were one of the unlucky few who caught Adult Swim's April Fool's Day sneak preview broadcast of the first 11 minutes of this episode, you would have seen this original animation. As it is, we still didn't catch every offending shot, so there are still a few of them in the final show.

In other news...

Last week's premiere apparently did really well in the ratings--the best we've ever done, by some accounts--and the online version received hundreds of thousands of hits as well. This is nice, and only slightly compromised by the knowledge that our Family Guy lead-in probably had something to do with it. I'll take it where I can get it, though.

Shirt Club has been a phenomenal success. We received way more orders for both subscriptions and single Guild t-shirts than we expected in our most ambitious estimates. The second week's shirt is now available for ordering over at Astrobase Go, so Astrobase go there now...



Our apologies to those who mistakenly missed the ordering deadlines. Despite the slightly misleading copy at the top of the ordering page, we clearly stated elsewhere on the page that the deadline for the first shirts and subscriptions would be 11:59pm on Saturday, June 7th. And this will remain our policy for the remainder of Shirt Club: each shirt will go up at 11:30pm the night a new episode airs and the ordering period will close at 11:59 the following Saturday night. Everyone needs a day of rest, after all. Or, in this case, a day to get our shit together.

Am still writing my first solo script for Season 4. Which is terrifying because we're starting production on Season 4 a week from Monday. Writing's been difficult because we're currently editing episode 35 of Season 3, World Leaders has just moved its offices to another floor, we've been doing a lot of interviews lately, we just got the first take of our finale episode back from Korea, and we're in the middle of a wicked heat wave here in New York. Just don't tell my producer on me.

We Love You,

JP

P.S. I know, I know...I broke the "no Star Wars references" rule already. It's my last one of the season, I swear. Doc blows it once this season, too (though he denies it), so we figure we're even on this one and nobody has to get any haircuts they don't want. But we're still proudly 98% Star-Wars-Reference-Free, and that's sort of an accomplishment for anyone of my generation!