#ok ko lakewood plaza turbo

i wanna try sticking to the habit of talkin about our episodes after they air!

Like Toby already said, we received the Legends of Mr. Gar outline AFTER we had a lot of episodes that highlighted his insecurities. This episode was meant to show Mr. Gar doing a lot of badassery and mentorship, to highlight why he is such a respected figure in the plaza. I was really excited to do this episode, because Mr. Gar is my favorite person to draw out of the entire OK K.O. cast… he’s basically a fridge with limbs!

The first part of the episode where Mr. Gar fights darrell was completely boarded by ian, and served as a great foundation to build the rest of the episode off of! I feel like I learn so much from Ian on the daily with regards to story, pacing and structure, it was great to see and study its application firsthand! 

The taking off shades to reveal another pair of shades is a gag that is done to death, but it always gets me and still makes me laugh every single time i see it done. I’d been wanting to make Gar do this gag ever since i joined the team.

Like multiple people have already mentioned, flashback Enid was based off an early Rebecca Sugardesign! Such beauuuutiful haaiiirrrr!

Here is the progression Gar Ham-Pec Shelf Gag, from the initial pitchtowhat i eventually turned intowhat it finally ended up looking like! It was a throwaway joke, and I was certain that everyone was gonna nix it because it was too weird and out-there… how wrong i was! And how grateful i am! Also, you can really see how much design and animation stick to our storyboards!

Another gag that i thought was gonna get nixed was Dogmun producing a bone and money from his mouth. It was a really strange joke as is, but Ian had the great idea of putting in the exact price amount on the dollar (techno) bill! Also as an aside I’d just like to say that i really love Dogmun and will usually default to putting him in as a side character whenever I can.

I did the original designs for the Lad Boxman in Crinkly Wrinkly’s flashback, and I decided to base him off of a character I have nothing but real, genuine, seething contempt for: the berries and cream lad. Lad Boxman was described in the outline as insufferable little wretch (memory hazy, this COULD have just been in my own head), so I couldn’t think of anyone more appropriate to base his vibe off of. I hate the berries and cream lad. 

An additional detail that you may have already picked up on: Lad Boxman is wearing the same outfit that darrell requests to (and eventually does) wear in We’re Captured, originally designed by Ryann!

I didn’t draw this last board panel, it was all Haewon! I just wanted to post it because it is one of my all time favorite drawings of rad. I think about it a lot.

I’d also like to reiterate Toby’s sentiment and say that JAKE/MINTPOTIONREALLY BLEW ME AWAY WITH THE MUSIC FOR THIS EPISODE!!! I’m always surprised at the phenomenal jump in episode quality after we lay down his masterful tracks! I do a lot of storyboards with his OK KO tracks playing in the background and I feel like it really helps with the creative process! Music is amazing….!!?!?!??

As always, thanks for reading!

tobyjones:

Just Be A Pebble

This was the FIRST EPISODE we produced! As I’ve stated before, we started with a few simpler stories before making the “first” episodes and this one is indeed very simple. We wrote it to be a linear, self-contained opportunity for the characters to act the way they are supposed to act and the world to be the way it’s supposed to be. It mostly takes place in the plaza, giving our designers an opportunity to build up a cache of experience and artwork leading up to everything’s true first reveal in “Let’s Be Heroes”. Because this was the first episode, there are some things going on visually that chose to not carry over into future episodes but are fun to see here. It’s like our “Doug Can’t Dance”! Or our “Tommy’s First Birthday”! Yeah, you get it.

After making the pilot and all those shorts, we weren’t really sure what an 11-minute episode might actually look and feel like. Ian and I boarded two unproduced episodes between the pilot and the series, but a lot had changed since then.  After seeing Mira and Geneva’s first pitch, we were completely energized. It’s a real show! It works! They were the first to set the tone for the comedy, action, and especially the characters. 

Presenting Joe Cuppa

Believe it or not, this is a very personal episode for me. During our summer 2015 development time, Ian and I spent a number of days building out the world by creating dozens of characters and their backstories. A lot of them came from the crowd shot in the original pilot. Here is proto-Cuppa (and Crinkly Wrinkly, and Dogmun!)

I suggested giving him a Rodney Dangerfield-esque lounge lizard persona, something I find inherently funny. In 2010 I had co-written a feature length screenplay about a character like this trying to live a normal life while being physically unable to speak in anything but Dangerfeldian quips and one-liners. Nobody wanted to fund that movie for SOME REASON, but I was able to infuse some of its spirit into this story. It was Dave Tennant who decided Joe Cuppa should specifically speak in coffee puns, and Erin Shade who conceived the hilarious extended slapstick sequence at the end.

This episode has a clear example of why it’s so fun working on a board driven show. I had written this bit in the original premise, which I thought was SO FUNNY-

Then at Stevie and Danny’s board pitch, I was blown away by how far the concept got pushed. My line worked fine as a dialogue joke, but it became something much more imaginative and visual. If you’ve seen the episode, you know what I’m talking about!

We’ve Got Pests

Pests is a super old idea! Ian and I first started meeting to talk about Lakewood Plaza Turbo in 2013, and one of the story pitches I had was that the Plaza gets infested by tiny 90s platformer mascots. In 2015 we wrote our first outline, which was completely different. It was still an Enid story, but it was all about her trying to be a cool employee and not care when things went wrong at the plaza. We felt pretty good about it and moved on. When time came to hand the episode out to board, I realized we had taken a lot of these themes and tackled them with more depth in “You Have to Care”, which we had just finished outlining. So with just a few days to go before handout, we re-broke the entire story to cover different thematic territory.

The main thing that held between all versions is the ending where we see the pests grow and change over many years thanks to Enid’s words. It’s one of my favorite ideas we’ve ever put into the show, and Danny did an amazing job making this a standout sequence in the series.

Fun fact: another secret internal document we use is called “Illegal Words”. It’s a list of words, phrases and terms we have required ourselves to avoid. Items on the list vary from cliches, soon-to-be-dated slang, pet peeves, overused jokes, etc.  For this episode we decided to open pandora’s box and allow the pests to say some of these illegal words. Whether this was good satire or a grievous error is up to the viewer. It was an experiment we will likely never try again!

Legends of Mr. Gar

As we started figuring out where we were going with the season, having outlined episodes like “Face Your Fears” and “Plaza Prom”, we realized we were spending a lot of our Gar time on his nervousness around Carol and were missing a big showcase of his amazing hero power. Because we were working pretty far ahead, we were able to very quickly write up this story and hand it out ahead of those other episodes to keep Gar in balance. Ian came up with the initial concept and we had a lot of fun dipping into the backstories of the characters. The opening scene is actually heavily cannibalized from one of our 2014 unproduced development boards, and Skateboard Nerd’s explosive final fate is based on a cut scene from one of Ian’s Secret Mountain Fort Awesome episodes!

This episode has more hilarious wand weird moments than I can count. I love that we were able to do such a fun digression with an unconventional structure this early in the series. Dave’s visual gag of Gar walking out from behind a shelf that looks like his body… legendary. Haewon’s sequences of young Rad.. incredible. Crinkly Wrinkly’s tall tale… fact or fiction?!

ALSO Jake and Mint Potion did incredible work on this episode. They completely blow us away every week, but I especially loved their variations on Rad and Enid’s character themes here. 

I really love Toby’s commentary on the episodes, it’s spot on and always manages to capture the sentiment of the episodes before and after it passes through our storyboarding hands! Even though these episodes were only made around a year ago, his words are a very accurate time capsule to those who wanted to experience the inner workings of our team!! 

I love the commentary posts that Toby has been doing, so i wanted to follow suit and give some backstory to the episode! It goes without saying that there will be spoilers, so mute #OK KO SPOILERS if you wanna keep your eyes and ears unspoilt!

This was the first episode that Haewon and I got that addressed substantial main story points! It was a very intimidating episode to tackle, but it ended up being immensely fun and satisfying to work on! Since it’s about getting trapped in a video game, i decided to lean hard into my nerdy videogamey roots and paid a lot of homage to games that left a huge impact on me! 

The Face Of Fear arcade machine:

The arcade machine was in Haewon’s part of the episode, but i couldn’t help making designs for it… and not only did she use it, she made it even better!! She designed the SUPER EXTRA HARD DIFFICULTY version that the machine turns into after Gar bites off more than he can chew!

Dendy’s explanation of how the game works:

I made a little video game overworld map segment to accompany dendy’s explanation of how the Face of Fear game works! This was a blend of three of my all time favorite games: I referenced MAGICAL DROP 3 for the general UI of the map because I love its aesthetics, I referenced the TURBO TUNNEL stage from the original BATTLETOADS N.E.S. game because that was one of the most terrifying and nightmarish stages i have ever played through as a child (a perfect fit for a game that is basically a nightmare given form imo), and i referenced EXOR from SUPER MARIO RPG, because that boss battle had such a huge impact on me when i first played it! Exor still looks really cool and badass to me, to this very day.

Enid’s Fear:

This is probably the most obvious reference, if you’ve ever played Chrono Trigger! It’s based on the climactic Magus fight, about a quarter of the way into the game! chrono trigger has been such a huge influence and helped me shape what my definitions of dramatic storytelling were, so i just HAD to give it a nod, even if its application wasn’t half as dramatic as the source material, hehe.

Rad’s Fear:

I can’t remember for the life of me if it was me or haewon that thought of having rad’s fear set in a room that was just a bunch of rad faces laughing and posturing (pretty sure it was haewon), but i DID draw this diagram of the room’s layout!

I have hit the image limit for this post, so i think i will end this here! There are more references in this episode, maybe i’ll do a part 2? maybe not? who knows! Thanks for reading, all the same! And to those who were saying that the right enid portrait in her fearscape looked a little familiar…