Creator Breakdown / Western Animation

• Parodied in Don Hertzfeldt's short film, Rejected. Hertzfeldt is unable to sell any of his work, and as a result, the creation quite literally falls apart.
• South Park:
  • According to co-creator Trey Parker, the episode "Raisins" (in which Stan's girlfriend Wendy breaks up with him) was based on the trials and tribulations he went through when he found his fiancée in bed with another man. Stan's thoughts in the episode reflect Parker's.
  • The character of Cartman's mom was created and named after Parker's ex-fiancée who left him at the altar. Liane Cartman has slept with virtually every inhabitant of South Park, although as of late she's actually become more firm and less slutty, indicating that Parker's feelings on the matter have died down at this point. The same girlfriend was the name of the horse in Cannibal! The Musical — who leaves Parker's character during the film. In fact, just listen to the drunken commentary on the DVD.
  • "Simpsons Already Did It" has a very exasperated tone in response to a charge Parker and Stone had clearly gotten sick to death of.
• The opening crawl in the third episode of Family Guy Presents: Laugh It Up, Fuzzball states that the show's staff was sick of doing the Star Wars parodies. The DVD Commentary for the episode makes it clear that they were definitely not joking.
• In-universe example in the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Mermaid Man & Barnacle Boy VI: The Motion Picture". The titular film suffers a comically-exaggerated Troubled Production, culminating in Patrick having filmed the whole thing with the lens cap still on the camera. SpongeBob suffers a massive Freak Out, and it's only thanks to a Rousing Speech/Rambling Old Man Monologue from Mermaid Man that the film actually gets finished.
• At a convention, Meghan McCarthy said of writing My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic that the reason why one of the main characters goes crazy in many of the episodes she's written is because they were mostly composed in the wee hours of the morning under a tight deadline, reflecting her stress.
  "Clock is ticking, Twilight! CLOCK... IS... TICKING!"^note Twilight was going nuts because she couldn't think of a friendship lesson of the week and there has to be one every week!
• Shortly after the first season of Rocko's Modern Life Joe Murray's first wife committed suicide, so Murray started spending less and less time working on the series, until he finally just gave up on it altogether. Thus seasons 3 and 4 are not produced by him, and the series came to an end after season 4. For a while out of grief, he Mis-blamed the series for his wife's suicide. He also went though this during the making of Camp Lazlo, this time as a result of his second wife divorcing him.
• Towards the end of his theatrical career Tex Avery suffered from depression and was convinced that he couldn't be funny anymore, part of this was because his son died from a heroin overdose. Fittingly, his last short, Shhhhhh, which deals with a man who suffers a nervous breakdown due to stress, seems to capture the ordeal he was going through.
• Skyler Page, creator of Clarence, had problems with bipolar disorder that, combined with the stress of running a show, caused a psychotic episode where he groped female co-workers and ran out into the street shirtless yelling at police officers. His disorder having caused some trouble in the past, as well as the sexual harassment incidents becoming public and creating a PR panic, led to him being fired by Cartoon Network and the role of Clarence being recast.
  • According to one of Skyler's close friends, in the days prior to that incident he witnessed him doing things like trying to smoke cigarettes with his nose, charging into the street shirtless while screaming at cops (which apparently happened again on the day of the actual incident), drinking olive juice, staying up for days, and when going to a mental hospital after the event he began to sing They Might Be Giants songs while strapped to a hospital bed. He was eventually released from the hospital and now does random art on his Instagram account, and has never mentioned Clarence, the incident or his firing.
• This was averted with Pendleton Ward, who stepped down as showrunner for Adventure Time sometime during the production of season five, after realizing that the stress of running the show was starting to drive him crazy.
• Occurs in-universe in the Ren & Stimpy episode "Reverend Jack". Meat salesman and meat-puppeteer Reverend Jack Cheese has a psychotic break and stops producing shows, eventually forcing the title characters to carry on the business without him—and leading to Cheese becoming their new harshest critic. Reverend Jack was a Take That! at show creator John Kricfalusi. And according to background artist William Wray, a combo of John K. getting fired from the series, letting the shows success get to his head and losing his longtime girlfriend during its production were all factors in his career gradually spiraling downhill from then on.
  "As far as I know what seemed to trigger the real acting out was the loss of his long time girlfriend, the rise of his power/fame and then the loss of Ren And Stimpy. This trifecta of emotional highs and lows seemed to open him up to a kind of total recklessness and plunged him into a bitter take no prisoners martyrdom. Spumco truly became the John K. House of worship, free of voices of reason. I do think he was brilliant and original visionary who was smart enough to know he needed a unique as him crew of artists and writers to make R and S great, but after he cracked, he forgot he had a great team, great timing in a low ebb in the Animation world, a great new network that believed in him and gave him the world and the love of millions of fans."
• Charles M. Schulz struggled with poor health, physically and mentally, for most of his life, in addition to a string of martial problems and family-related deaths. The toll this all took on him had a tendency to seep through in the animated Peanuts specials, most notably A Charlie Brown Christmas, Snoopy, Come Home, and Why, Charlie Brown, Why?.

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