Producer's Commentary: Dicks Season 3
After taking a brief look at PTSD (it will return), I had Carl under a microscope mostly to deal with a faux pas I'd committed in "Meet the Dicks," when Carl refers to himself as an "ex-Marine." This I learned does not fit the Marine mentality, so I explained it away by making him a deserter, which led to Carl's "confession" in my first two-parter, "Truth."
But first I wanted to remind viewers (as if I had any) that Dicks was still a comedy, at least in part, which resulted in "Girls Night," "Dicks on the Web" and "Ice Cream." These, I hope, have benefitted from knowing the characters better, as character-based humor is often more effective.
More drama crept in when I decided to give Ping more attention, and her backstory inspired "Sacrifice," and will lead to more arcs to explore in future seasons. But I didn't want to end this season on a serious note, as I had the previous one, so I created "Blackout."
"Girls Night" was just an excuse to feature a few brief clips from other video programs
I've made, including Max Dumproom and Thomas the Tanked
Engine. The most fun was assembling the clips, separated by classic bits of static and noise, which
are not canned effects. In retrospect, I should have featured a clip from one of my cat videos instead
of the Dicks episode, but it works as is. Definitely lightweight, but I still enjoy it.
I'd actually made this episode for the prior season, but it got bumped by "Secrets," which I wanted to keep together with the other Rita stories, so I figured this one would be a good way to start things off after the drama-laden "Incoming!"
"Dicks on the Web" came into being for one reason only: I wanted someone to yell,
"We're dicks! We're dicks!" When I hit upon the idea of a botched website as the setup
for the punchline, I felt a particular twinge of familiarity, having been a webmaster for a few
decades (and while I've made plenty of mistakes, none of them were quite this bad). It's actually
kind of amusing the lengths I'll go to just to tell a stupid joke.
I owe the existence of "Grumpiness" to a friend who comes over for dinner every
Saturday night. He's a former Marine, so he's been invaluable for shaping Carl's story arc. But
he also inspired this episode after remarking on the old grumpy fart trope. He moaned about how
they're all the same, so I set about making Paul unique among his kind. It was a very enjoyable
episode to write, and came together effortlessly. And my friend loved it.
Now, about the punchline... The episode was supposed to end with Paul simply answering Glen with "yes" or something equally lame. But as I was doing the lip-syncing, which is the last thing I do to an episode, Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" suddenly popped into my head. It was Kismet.
The flipside to "Grumpiness," "Happiness" was an idea hanging around since
"First Date" from the prior batch. Imagine a person going through
life afraid of other people, afraid of being hurt, and for the first time is freed from that fear.
A sequel of sorts to "First Date," it's a straight-up romance piece, as syrupy as it gets. I'll confess to being an enormous softie when it comes to this stuff, so it was effortless to write, especially since it's actually semi-autobiographical: I was bulled mercilessly in school, from grades four through twelve, and I allowed myself to talk about this black time through Rita. And I gave Glerp a chance to describe what an ideal society might be like: "Everyone is polite and kind." Why can't humans be like that?
My second two-parter delivered a big reveal on Carl, guided by discussions I had with a former
Marine; his advice informed many aspects of "Truth." One of the bigger challenges was getting
the timing right: success can ride on the pauses between lines of dialog, as well as the characters'
expressions, limited as they are by their design.
Although I pay very little attention to what takes place on YouTube, I did find it mildly interesting that, so far, this is the only episode that got downvoted, for reasons unknown since there were no comments posted.
I concluded Carl's big confession with some fairly stereotypical guy-based dialog, using beer as
a sort of bonding medium. This is also where Glen started to transition from a big dumb football fan
into something of a wise man. He listens well and gives good advice, which will prove to be advantageous
in other ways going forward.
This was the first episode that received downvotes on YouTube, although I don't pay much attention to such nonsense. Since there were no comments left, the downvote could have been for any random reason.
"Truth" needed to be followed by something light, so I devised this amusing little romantic
thingie between Rita and Glerp that also serves to further deepen their bond. Without revealing
too much, be aware that "Ice Cream" is a setup for future events. With the serial format,
it's easier to create these little setup/payoff elements, which I find very satisfying.
As a technical aside, Glerp's names for the dessert, as well as the creature from whence it's derived, are nonsense words that I then reversed to create a more alien sound.
"Sacrifice" was born from a desire to give Ping some backstory, especially since I felt
that I'd been ignoring her up to this point. I wanted her story to be powerful as well as poignant,
and while the idea of being involved in some way with an internment camp may have been a bit too
obvious, this is after all a cartoon with very little in the way of elbowroom for deep, complex
stories; KISS is the rule of the day here.
The toughest aspect of writing this one was how to wrap it up, and I had a dozen different endings, all of them as bland as plain toast. When I struck upon the idea of giving Paul a PhD in some as-yet-to-be-revealed field, it steered me toward something meaningful he could say that draws its strength from being surprisingly self-deprecating.
I confess that I did swipe a phrase Ping uses from an episode of one of my favorite television shows, although I doubt anyone would notice or be bothered by it.
"The Gift" actually began as "Truth, Part Three," but I felt I was laying it
on pretty heavy by dragging that story out to three episodes. So I set it aside for another time,
hoping that the distance might make the payoff more enjoyable. I actually sort of wrote it backwards,
starting with the ending and working toward the beginning.
Technically this was a beast. The big speed bump was the mower's reveal: I tried all sorts of gimmicks, and nothing was working. Then somewhere along the line I thought, let's leverage Glen's size, and just have him fling off a big cardboard box. With that out of the way, the next challenge was the transition from the crowd gathered around the mower to Ping and Glen talking about how she made it happen. I knew what I wanted to see on the screen, but getting there was a long haul with a lot of manual tweaking. Persistence paid off.
Rather than another heavy dramatic beat, I decided to end this batch of episodes with a smile.
This one gave me the opportunity to offer a glimpse of Carl beginning to heal. Plus I got to make
a few visuals that proved to be a lot of fun, such as the old eyes-in-the-dark effect. Actually,
I resorted to this after I'd made a rough cut with no eyes, just pure blackness. Unfortunately,
it made it seem as though the video player crapped out, and feared that was how it might across
off online, with viewers bailing the moment everything went black.
As for the admittedly cringeworthy reference to E.T., I let Carl react to it just as I would have, and it ended this batch with a good LOL moment.