Producer's Commentary: Season 1
How did this stupid idea come about, anyway? Well, for starters, I recently moved into a retirement trailer park. And you know the old saying: write about what you know. True story: I awoke one morning and had a very strange and admittedly grim vision: that of a landscaper on his big riding mower streaking along the front yards of these trailers and taking out some hapless old woman's little dog in the process. And for some sick reason, I decided I wanted to animate that. Which I did. And yes, it gets a big "ew" from the audience every time, but the ews are often followed by chuckles, because, well, everyone's a little sick around the edges.
Thus was born Dicks. Why no apostrophe? Because the trailer park where I live is Roberts, no apostrophe. Ask a silly question, get a silly answer. Anyway, I was going to add that none of the characters in the show are based on any real people. Except maybe for Paul; he's got a lot of me in him. other than that, everyone is original oddness.
The
"pilot" episode was carefully planned to build the series' environment, as well as
establish the comic tone through the use of relatively rude, crude visual gags and double-entendres.
I freely admit to its juvenile approach, although I tried to keep it breezy enough that the dumb jokes
weren't overdone.
It also establishes the visual style, which is very simplistic for multiple reasons: a budget of zero meant using the software tools at my disposal, which didn't offer much in the way of animation versatility, so I stuck with geometric shapes and just enough detail to sell the visuals.
All of the artwork was created using CorelDraw, while the audio and video editing were done with an old version of Sony Movie Studio. Voices were all generated using an online voice synthesis application called Voicemaker, a powerful and sophisticated tool offering hundreds of voices and thousands of effects options.
The name? When the image of a park shaped like rude graffiti popped into my head, the name naturally followed. Incidentally, the park where I live is named Roberts, with no apostrophe. Hence it's Dicks Retirement Trailer Park.
"Meet the Dicks" was a way for the audience to understand our characters as quickly as possible.
Character design was critical: with the simple geometric visual style, I needed to convey their personalities
visually as quickly as possible, so I pushed their features to extremes.
Their voices were also critical, so I spent a great deal of time on Voicemaker finding just the right qualities. Thankfully the tool is incredibly versatile, so was able to build quite satisfying results; in particular, I needed each of the voices to not only suit the character, but also to be very distinct from one another.
The script was quite easy to write. However, in hindsight, I didn't "know" my characters then as well as I do now after four series, so some of my ideas for their personalities have changed. Glen's transformation was particularly dramatic: he went from a word-mangling football mega-fanatic to the community's wise man of sorts.
Incidentally, none of the characters are based on real people in the park where I live, or even anyone I know; they're all pure fiction.
Originally I'd wanted to introduce all six main characters in one episode, but with only 47 seconds
of screen time (one minute minus the titles and end credits), this wasn't going to work, so "Meet
the Grrl Dicks" allowed me to give each resident enough time to provide a relatively satisfying
little interview. All of the same issues I faced with the guys applied here, with unique and distinct
character design paramount. I was a bit worried about Ping, but was lucky enough to find a voice on
VoiceMaker with a thick Asian accent, but without being too stereotypical.
As with the guys, the girls have gone through changes over time. Dot started out as totally ditzy, but has become thoughtful and caring. Ping has turned into one tough cookie. And, without revealing too much, Rita has had the most dramatic story arc of them all.
Incidentally, none of the characters are based on real people in the park where I live, or even anyone I know; they're all pure fiction.
Outside of the pilot and character intros, "Football Night" was not the first episode of the
series that I created. I build episodes on an ad hoc basis, then rearrange them into a more logical
order just before their release. I can't recall, but this may have been the fifth or sixth episode I wrote.
This one was meant to be pure cartoon nonsense: the visual gag of Glen's trailer sinking into the ground, which I did after already rendering a different ending, obviously makes no logical sense; it's merely an admittedly lame joke. The episode also doesn't do much in the way of character building, but this was back when I envisioned the series strictly as an episodic comedy. Oh, how things have changed.
Incidentally, the original ending was a static image that showed Glen's unit simply crushed into the ground. However, it looked on screen as though the unit was instead in very shabby condition, unfortunately suggesting that the character was a lazy bum. I felt that animating an undamaged unit sinking not only was potentially funnier, but also avoided any possibility of racist overtones.
"Long Overdue" is pure dumbness, but it was inspired by a real life situation I experienced
with the the unit where I live. I just had this admittedly warped
mental image of pipes being so thickly invaded with roots that removing them also sucked the trees down
whole. The opening sequence, again very loosely inspired by real events, was meant to mislead the viewer
into thinking it was going to be an episode filled end-to-end with bathroom humor.
the episode presents the running gag that Carl constantly misuses the Marine mantra Semper Fi, employing it as a noun, verb, adverb, whatever. While this is the first time it appears in the series, I'd first conceived it when I wrote "Landscaping Emergency," which follows.
"Landscaping Emergency" was the very first episode I wrote, which was based on a strange
vision I had long before I conceived Dicks: I had this mental image of some yahoo on an
overpowered riding mower racing across a string of front yards in a trailer park, accidentally running
over a small dog in the process.
With this image stuck in my head, I built an entire fictional world around it. The old saying is "write about what you know," and since in real life I was recently transplanted into a retirement trailer park, I chose that as the setting for Dicks. Then I had to create a situation that resulted in the gag, which was somewhat easier than I'd expected. What I didn't realize at first is that it set up a situation I could exploit for subsequent episodes, which eventually helped push me in the direction of a serial.
I know full well that it's mildly disturbing for dog lovers, and I have received a bit of heat over it, but come on folks, it's just a cartoon. If nothing else, it helps establish the series as bizarre, irreverent, and a bit edgy, even though the tone of the show would eventually morph.
"Rat Dog the Second" was the direct descendant of "Landscaping Emergency,"
although it was conceived as one of the last in the first series. Also, the name "Rat Dog"
originally just a throwaway line, but after I thought about it, I realized it would make a suitably
was strange formal name for Dot's pet.
This episode marked the first time I utilized multi-axis animation; previously I'd relied on simple pans. While quite time-consuming to execute, I felt it was the only way I could sell the gag. This then inspired more similarly animated bits to come in future episodes.
"Worth a Month's Pay" was yet another sequel to "Landscaping Emergency."
It was, however, pretty tough to write, and even harder to animate. Worse, due to the dialog at the
end, which presents an escalating manly-man sort of verbal conflict, it remains one of my least-favorite
episodes, even after attempting to lighten the mood with Paul's dry wit.
All that being said, the plot went on to inspire still further episodes, which included a poignant turning point in the third series.
"Rivalry" is admittedly a pretty weak entry. I was attempting to establish Carl as a self-absorbed
chick magnet, when in fact he's destined to become more of a shit-magnet. Having difficulty finding a direction
for what I'd conceived, I penned several endings, the final choice not being much better than the rest. I thought
the old "he's right behind me" trope might rescue it, but alas it's still not very satisfying. I kept it
mostly because I wanted to round out the first batch of episodes as quickly and painlessly as possible.
However, this also marked the point at which I elected to send Glen and Dot down the path to romance, the twist, such as it is, being that it's driven entirely by Dot; Glen is just sort of along for the ride.
I
conceived "New Resident" as a means to introduce all manner of silliness into the series.
Intended merely as comic relief, Glerp was instead destined to become a major focal point of some serious
drama, totally unbeknownst to me at the time. But now I'm getting ahead of myself.
Glerp proved to be an animating challenge. Because humans know how humans speak, I can take all sorts of shortcuts and still sell talking people in cartoon form. However, here we have a character who lacks a familiar human mouth, and the only way to sell him speaking is to articulate the hell out of it; he has almost twice as many mouth shapes as any other character. Likewise his eyes are tougher to animate. But, at the end of the day, I think the extra work was worth it.