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Trivia / Mission Hill

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  • Actor Allusion:
    • Gwen has a poster of The Go-Go's and it's established that she's a fan of the group. Gwen was voiced by Jane Wiedlin, rhythm guitarist of The Go-Go's.
    • One episode, Posey, played by Vicki Lewis, tries to "find herself" by meditating. At point, her spirit guide – a ghost version of her – says she has to walk across an incredibly long bridge, then say they can take her Miata instead. In the season two Christmas episode of NewsRadio, Beth (Lewis) and every one in the office is given a Mazda MX-5 Miata (well, except Mathew).
  • Keep Circulating the Tapes: Even though the show is out on DVD, all the licensed music has been overdubbed with generic music, so if you have any episodes from when it aired on The WB, [adult swim], or TBS, then keep those (whether you taped from a VCR, owned a recordable DVD player, had them DVR'd, or downloaded them one way or another). YouTube has the [adult swim] cut of the series with the licensed music, so catch them before they're pulled for copyright violations. Bill Oakley stated in 2017 that he was "totally fine" with people torrenting the series, and in 2013 he and Josh Weinstein screened a fan-made restoration with the original soundtrack during a country-wide tour.
  • Screwed by the Network: This is one of the best examples of truly screwed by the network. Mission Hill was essentially doomed to fail almost a year before the show aired thanks to The WB.
    • According to Bill Oakley, the show's staff was told that their upfronts "didn't matter", and so Oakley and Weinstein submitted a poorly edited two minute long clip. Later, during The WB's schedule presentation, they failed to air anything about Mission Hill. For a whole seven months before the show's premiere, journalists knew nothing about the show except the bad two-minute upfront that was submitted, leading to nearly universally bad reviews.
    • Even worse, the WB immediately scheduled Mission Hill for the "death slot" – Friday at 8PM. The producers once lamented this decision, stating that Friday evening was "exactly the time the target audience was trying to not be at home watching WB." It aired before a black sitcom block consisting of For Your Love, The Jamie Foxx Show and The Steve Harvey Show, a completely polar opposite audience than what Mission Hill was aimed at. The show was put on hiatus after only two episodes. A full ten months later, the show was aired again, this time making it to five episodes before it was canceled for good.
  • Serendipity Writes the Plot: The French family were originally drawn with black hair, but the particular shade turned out blue from the neon backlighting used in the animation process.
  • Throw It In!: Vicki Lewis auditioned for Posey immediately after a dentist appointment and, as a result, was still loopy from the anesthetic, resulting in Posey's breathy voice. She was able to recall it for the rest of the series.
  • Unfinished Episode: When it was cancelled, there were five episodes in varying stages of production. One, "Pretty in Pink (or Crap Gets in Your Eye)", has a full animatic, at least one, "To Grandmother's House We Go (or Freaky Weekend in the Crappy Crudwagon)", has a partial animation and the rest exist only as scripts.
  • What Could Have Been: There were 18 planned episodes, with two of them ("Freaky Weekend" and "Pretty in Pink") having partial animatics and voice recording finished, and the three others ("Death of a Yale Man", "How to Get Head in Advertising" and "I Was a Teenage Pornstar") fully scripted. The series was canceled before any of them could be finished. The remaining material can be found in various places online. If the show hadn't been canceled, viewers would have seen Kevin finally standing up to his parents ("Bye, Bye Nerdie" or "I Was a Teenage Pornstar") and Ron's Waterbed Store (which was seized by the government after Ron got busted on tax evasion) would have been taken over by a man who looks like Ron, but is Southern ("Crap Gets in Your Eyes" or "Pretty in Pink").
  • Write Who You Know: Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein based most of the characters on people they knew growing up; of particular note, Stogie was based on a real dog of theirs while Andy was based on a young Matt Groening.

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