Style
In its first season, Home Movies utilized Soup2Nuts’ Squigglevision animation but later abandoned that for the cheaper, more malleable Macromedia Flash animation. The switch was initiated for several reasons: scattered negative response to Squigglevision (from both critics and viewers), limitations in regard to movement (fluid motion is rare in Squigglevision), and the producers' view that Squigglevision was inherent to Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist and that Home Movies should develop its own unique style.
Another quality that Home Movies carried over from Dr. Katz was its initial use of “retroscripting”, a process in which an episode’s scripts are purposely left vague, and instead of exact dialogue, the plot of a particular scene is merely outlined—the rest of the dialogue is then created through improv by the actors. The use of retroscripting in Home Movies gives the show very casual, realistic dialogue with an often dry, sarcastic wit. Although retroscripting was only used officially in the first season (the entire first episode was improvised from start to finish), the dialogue in the following three seasons remained heavily improvised, with the written script serving mainly as a guide or something to fall back on for jokes if needed.
Another prominent feature of the show was its use of original music written and performed by the series creator Brendon Small, a graduate of the Berklee College of Music, a self-proclaimed shredder, who went on to become the composer and guitarist of Dethklok.
A recurring visual theme within the show is lawn gnomes, which tends to make random but subtle appearances in the background of many scenes (even a gnome-shaped guitar appears in a music shop in the episode “Guitarmageddon”). At least one lawn gnome can be found in almost every episode of the series, as well as on the DVD box art, and as a cookie (which is an Easter Egg in the DVD menus on certain discs). Home Movies is one of the few shows on Adult Swim that carries a TV-PG rating. The show also uses its own censor, which is a bit higher pitched than Adult Swim's common bleep, as well as it being used on certain words that Adult Swim might have originally allowed.
Read more about this topic: Home Movies (TV series)
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“One who has given up any hope of winning a fight or has clearly lost it wants his style in fighting to be admired all the more.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Sometimes among our more sophisticated, self-styled intellectuals—and I say self-styled advisedly; the real intellectual I am not sure would ever feel this way—some of them are more concerned with appearance than they are with achievement. They are more concerned with style then they are with mortar, brick and concrete. They are more concerned with trivia and the superficial than they are with the things that have really built America.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“A church that can never have done with excommunicating Christ while it exists! Away with your broad and flat churches, and your narrow and tall churches! Take a step forward, and invent a new style of out-houses. Invent a salt that will save you, and defend our nostrils.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)