Entering its seventh season on Cartoon Network, Regular Show has grown past anything its creators, JG Quintel and Sean Szeles, could ever imagine. What was a story of two friends working their mundane job in a park became anything but.
But before season 7 can begin, there’s a Regular Show movie fans have to watch. It’s already out digitally and on DVD -- with the movie airing on Cartoon Network Nov. 25 -- and will change the dynamic of the series for the upcoming season, especially between Rigby and Mordecai.
iDigitalTimes sat down with the creators along with Art Director Paula Spence, the voice of Rigby William Salyers and Sam Marin who voices Pops, Benson and Muscle Man about the show and the movie at New York Comic-Con 2015 to talk about the Regular Show Movie and the upcoming season 7.
“The network, toward the end of season 5 was asking us in season 6 to do a 40-minute special, which is longer than what we’ve ever done,” JG Quintel said. “I felt that 40 minutes was a weird time so I thought ‘Why don’t we just make a movie’ and they were really cool about it.”
The Regular Show Movie took more than two years to finally complete and the creators had a hard time getting the film done, with production on the movie happening the same time as the show. Both Quintel and Szeles began production of the movie at the beginning of season 6 and wasn’t finally finished until they were writing season 8.
“There were breaks to get back to working on the show and then taking breaks from the show to work on the movie,” Szeles said. “And trying to figure out the story the exact story we wanted to tell and how it fits in our world."
“We are a storyboard driven show, so we don’t go off of a script we just write out what’s basically happening in the movie and an outline and then the board artists draw it and write it and then we listen to the pitch and start changing it,” Quintel said. “So we probably have two full versions of the movie that doesn’t exist. Because of all the changes and they aren’t on the DVD so it’s interesting to see how things changed from the final product.”
“When you hand something off to a board artist and they go to town on it and they make the sequence their own,” Szeles added. “So they get very long and this becomes a two and a half hour movie and you have to figure out how to streamline everything.”
The long process for the Regular Show Movie pays off for fans as the creators have received positive responses so far.
So will there be another Regular Show Movie?
“Under different circumstances. We wouldn’t want to make the show at the same time, that was too much work to do. I think it will be fun to do another one, I learned a lot,” Quintel said. “We never made a movie before so there was a lot of trial and error and redoing it to try and make it as good as we could. We didn’t have a real movie budget we are just working like we always do. We try to make it funny and just go from there.”
The Regular Show Movie picks up some threads from previous seasons -- sorry, we won’t spoil them here -- and sets up what’s to happen in Season 7. And fans should be happy to know that Season 7 is completely finished and that the cast has already begun Season 8, about 10 episodes for Season 8 are already finished.
But what can fans expect from Season 7 of Regular Show? Well, there will be another Halloween Special and a Christmas episode.
Fans of Party Horse will be happy to know he’ll be back as he tries and get girl advice from Rigby and Mordecai.
And speaking of the guys, Season 6 had a shift between Rigby and Mordecai’s life. Rigby towards the end of the season had his relationship with Eileen revealed and he has become the voice of reason for Mordecai whose girl problems mounted.
“I sort of feel like there’s been a slow progression of maturity for both the guys [Mordecai and Rigby], I think we just continue to deepen and explore the relationships,” Salyers said.
Quintel agrees.
“There’s a sort of arc with Rigby. He’s going to try and go back to school. You’ll see him deal with that for awhile, which is cool because it’s a big deal to him and we revealed he’s dating Eileen and she’s really smart. So he’ll eventually start to become really embarrassed about how dumb he is,” Quintel said.
Salyers liked the arc because, as an actor, he said it's rewarding to play a character that has some development.
“ I was thrilled when they were starting to write that in even back when the Rigby/Eileen relationship started happening,” Salyers said. “It’s nice to see I didn’t always have to play Rigby maniacally. And I love the whole anti-climactic reveal that he’s dating Eileen. It’s so not what we anticipate, it’s one of the great things about the show. I don’t know where they are going with the show and with moments like that they completely defy expectations. And I love playing that. Rigby is such a huge character that some of my favorite moments are the throwaways, when Rigby isn’t playing this douche.”
“It’s crazy to see how it’s flipped. It’s kind of neat to watch them reversed in their roles,” Quintel said. “Yea, that’s a lot of what you’ll get coming up, which is neat because it’s fresh territory for us and fun to see the characters in those positions.”
The Rigby and Mordecai dynamic in Regular Show season 7 came about organically
But what fans need to really look forward to is the Season 7 finale. The 30-minute long finale is a must-watch according to Quintel because if you miss it you’ll be lost and is only something you can do if you have been running for seven seasons.
“Sometimes I learn things as they come to me,” Spence said. “As the art director sometimes I don’t see them until they are storyboarded and written and it’s all fresh and new.
He [Quintel] likes everyone to be surprised and you’ll definitely be surprised. We work on episodes out of order and when I saw the season finale I was like ‘wait, what?!’ But yea you’ll definitely want to see that season finale.”
“We’ve said it at previous cons before but it’s never been truer than now,” Salyers said. “There are some really big things coming up.”
“We got a season finale that is going to be crazy. It’s the craziest thing we’ve ever done. I can’t wait for people to see it. I just want to see people’s reactions,” Quintel said. “I think they think ‘You can’t do anything crazier than what you’ve already done’ well I think we’ve figured out something.”
Season 7 of Regular Show is set to return on Cartoon Network Oct. 29.
