Writing By The Seat Of Your Pants / Western Animation

• Feline Follies, the debut film of Felix the Cat, was improvised by Otto Messmer in a very short period of time so that producer Pat Sullivan could give Paramount Screen Magazine a new cartoon to fill in for another series that was running late. Everything in the cartoon, except for the inking, was done by Otto Messmer himself on weekends.
  • According to Don Oriolo, the son of the TV Felix the Cat showrunner Joe Oriolo, the Trans-Lux cartoons had absolutely grueling production schedules to go hand in hand with the low budgets of $6,700 per episode—they had to churn out a few episodes of the show every week (one animator was reported to have been doing around 150 feet—or around 2 minutes of animation—per week). The scripts for each episode were written in hours, hence why there was so much inconsistency between the Professor being Felix's sworn enemy, and then hiring him as a helper now and then.
  "It's sort of the same concept as Bluto being friendly to Popeye in a couple of episodes. It just happened by way of scripts that were churned out in hours. Don't forget they were doing a few episodes a week. They didn't overthink anything or analyze anything because there was nothing to analyze. They were creating what is our history now—-and didn't think of the ramifications!"
  • The Felix the Cat comic books Otto Messmer and Joe Oriolo worked on likewise had grueling work schedules that forced them to make up stories as they went—they were expected to turn out one completed script per day.
• Animator Kurt Wiley said that the Australian animated series Crocadoo had an insanely tight production schedule, almost as bad as the aforementioned Joe Oriolo Felix cartoons—they had one week to complete each episode. And unlike the six-minute Felix cartoons, these were entire half-hour episodes!
• Some people, including animator Kurt Wiley, have claimed that some of the [adult swim] shows have some of the tightest deadlines in the industry, with entire half-hour episodes having to be completed in a single day.
• According to one of the head writers of Pinky and the Brain, Charles M. Howell, each of the 52 half-hour episodes only had one week to prepare a script for them. Despite this, they ended up going four months over schedule.
• According to the DVD Bonus Content, Freakazoid! was written with very little planning because of time constraints. Portions of the first short, "Dance of Doom", are just improv from Paul Rugg cut down for the runtime (and to eliminate profanity he said while riffing).
• The Ren & Stimpy Show creator John Kricfalusi had a story titled "Wilderness Adventure" rejected three times by Nickelodeon, and, because of it, he improvised the outline for "Fire Dogs" in an afternoon.
• Yellow Submarine began production with a beginning and ending director George Dunning animated himself, and told his writers (20, reputedly—Jack Mendelsohn and Erich Segal were the credited writers) and his animation directors (Bob Balser, Jack Stokes) to fill in the scenes between those points.
• Most episodes of South Park are pitched, storyboarded, written, animated, voice-recorded, and put on the air in the stretch of about one single week, one episode at a time. In contrast, most animated series take nine months per episode, with several episodes being in various stages of production at any given moment. This is why South Park's topical humor is more current than, say, what The Simpsons does. The only times this trope backfired on them were when "Goth Kids 3: Dawn of the Posers" from season 17 had to be postponed due to a power outage, and arguably when the U.S. presidential election of 2016 forced an episode to be rewritten at the last minute due to an upset victory.
• The writers of Beast Wars admitted in DVD Bonus Content that they were winging it as they were going along. They also said that things went wild around the time of the season finales as they weren't always sure they would get renewed for another season so they just adopted a "kill them all, let Hasbro sort it out" view when writing these episodes. This led to one particularly infamous moment where Inferno is clearly supposed to be utterly vaporized, yet in the next season he turns up burnt but otherwise unharmed.
• Speaking of Transformers, the first draft of the 1986 animated movie was hurriedly churned out by Ron Friedman not long after "Heavy Metal War" of the Generation 1 cartoon was written. It notably features many bizarre differences with the final product such as the Matrix of Leadership resembling a baby Optimus, Wheeljack (who was Killed Off for Real in the finished movie) being a rude misogynist to Arcee, and a whole bunch of Nazi references. Fellow Transformers writer Flint Dille and creative director Jay Bacal were displeased by this script, calling it "incoherent". Fortunately, the finished movie was christened with more care and attention, all in just two years.
• The crew behind Adventure Time is pretty open about the fact that half the show is meticulously planned out while the other half is completely made up on the fly.
  • The show taking place on Earth a thousand years after a nuclear war and the revelation that the Ice King was a normal human driven insane by his crown's magic power are major cornerstones of the show's lore that grew from a background gag and as a quick replacement for a previous episode idea (Jake and Finn doing an MST of an obscure real-world holiday special), respectively.
  • The reason Princess Bubblegum turned back to normal in the Season 3 premiere after becoming Finn's age in the previous episode was that the writers weren't sure what to do with a plot point like that.
  • Lemongrab become a recurring character purely because fans loved him so much. The writers never intended to have him appear again after his introductory episode.
• While the writers of Steven Universe really did come up with some ideas long before they were formally introduced, such as the major twist in the show's fifth season being planned from the start, there are still a lot of important elements that were only written retroactively and benefited from the magic of Cerebus Retcon. The major ones include:
  • Season 1A ended with the revelation that there were other gems that the Crystal Gems had come into conflict with, and Garnet and Pearl seeming anxious that the same thing will happen again. While the crew had a vague idea of a Great Offscreen War fought on the Earth, most of the details of who the Crystal Gems fought and why were decided after they wrote that scene.
  • Amethyst being created on Earth. While her joining the Crystal Gems post-war had always been part of the character's backstory, her specifically being made at the Earth Kindergarten was thought up during the writing sessions for Season 1B; Garnet's "We kept Amethyst" line from early in the show's run wasn't intended as foreshadowing at the time. Amethyst's short height being the gem equivalent of a birth defect was also something thought up later still.
  • The Cluster. While it would become a major plot element of the second season, the crew wasn't exactly sure what they were even alluding to when it was first mentioned in the Season 1B finale. They wouldn't figure it out until partway through the development of Season 2, with the initial idea being that it could be a conventional (though enormous) monster the heroes would have to confront directly.
  • Bismuth. While they had planned out most of the character's details by the time they finished producing the first season, her bubbled gemstone was added to the background of Lion's mane in the middle of the season before deciding who she was, why she was there, or if she was even a character at all — preliminary ideas included it just being a portable warp device, not a gem.
  • When Peridot insulted Yellow Diamond in "Message Received", her over-the-top reaction (both a very memorable Wild Take and attempt to kill Peridot by blowing up her communicator) were meant to imply she held a grudge. This idea ended up being abandoned a few episodes later (the manhunt Peridot assumed for her turned out to be for Jasper) and outright contradicted when the two meet again a few seasons later (and Yellow Diamond doesn't even recognize Peridot).
  • The Alien Abduction arc at the end of Season 4 was in part spurred on by a minor dialogue exchange from Season 1B. The writers had no such intention for the moment laying the groundwork for the later event at the time of writing, coming up with the idea during Season 4 writing sessions.
• Genndy Tartakovsky claims that he was so stressed out trying to manage his own television series for the first time with Dexter's Laboratory, that he was constantly beating out stories that he never got to see the completed forms of until they aired on TV.
• Dan Povenmire was asked to pitch Phineas and Ferb: Star Wars before he had actually finished the script. He explained the script anyway and actually managed to fix every plot-hole during the pitch meeting without anyone realizing he was improvising.
• The original pitch for The Simpsons was rather spontaneously improvised: Matt Groening was waiting to meet with TV executives about an adaptation for his comic Life in Hell, when it occurred to him that he'd have to sell the rights. He quickly doodled a series of new characters loosely based on (and, with the exception of his own Author Avatar Bart, named after) his family members, and the rest is history.
• Almost everything in Gravity Falls outside the identity of the Author was made up as the writers went along, with them jokingly apologizing for the show not being as perfectly planned out as fans believe after every instance of this in the show's DVD commentary tracks. Several important details and plot elements were usually the result of an idea being put in purely because it seemed cool or funny, only to get Cerebus Retconned later.
  • Originally, they had no idea what role Bill Cipher would play in the series, if any role at all. His connection to The Author and eventual role as Big Bad are a far-cry from his original character concept as a benign prankster who simply gave Dipper fake conspiracy information.
  • The phrase "Search for the Blind Eye", Arc Words that were teased between the Season 1 and 2 hiatus, were something Hirsch threw in because he thought it sounded cool, then had to figure out what it meant later.
  • The journals and their respective owners were not even conceived until the production of the fourth episode.
  • During production of the first episode, the writers had no idea what was behind Stan's vending machine. They only came up with the multidimensional portal when they were writing the season finale and realized their planned reveal of him owning Journal #1 wouldn't be all that impactful on its own.
  • The wheel of symbols surrounding Bill in the opening credits had no meaning upon conception. It was just meant to be a cool visual using various pieces of imagery from the show. It was only when they saw fans speculating about the symbols online that they retroactively attached each one to a character.
  • Before Old Man McGucket was made to be The Author's old lab assistant, he was originally just meant to be a one-off character.
• The Legend of Korra was originally a mini-series that only had one season, which was why it ended with all the lingering plot points wrapped up. Since it became unexpectedly popular, Nickelodeon pushed for more seasons, causing the following seasons to have to be written a bit on the fly to try and move the story forward after such a decisive ending, with season two ending on a slight reset to the characters. This lead to elements such as Korra's abilities, character development, and romance arcs having to be adjusted, like Korra's relationship with Mako going from dating at the end of season one and start of two, being sunk part way through season two, and later having her get with Asami after fans began pushing for them to become a thing. Seasons three and four were notably better received thanks to having more plot lines to build off of, but the sudden increase in seasons left the writers having to write on the fly compared to Avatar: The Last Airbender.
• The Emperor's New Groove: The film suffered from a Troubled Production, which involved a Mid-Development Genre Shift from traditional Disney musical epic to a Screwball Comedy. Following this shift, much of plot and dialogue was improvised as production went along. When the Disney company archives requested a copy of the film’s script after it released, the filmmakers realized it didn’t have one, and sent several boxes of the film’s written material to the archives which was then complied in to the first draft of the film’s script, a few weeks after the film hit theaters.

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