Production
Aqua Teen Hunger Force is directed by Jeremiah Mills and Matt Maiellaro, animated by Radical Axis and produced by Williams Street. Much of the dialogue is supplemented with ad libs and improvisation by the voice talent. The show is fully scripted but ad libs are included in the final voice recordings and the shows are animated to include this improvisation. Many, if not all, of the crew and cast members formerly worked on Space Ghost Coast to Coast. Rapper Schoolly D performed the theme song for the first seven seasons, and in early episodes also provided periodic commentary. As of season eight, the theme song was performed by Josh Homme.
The three main characters—Master Shake, Frylock, and Meatwad—were originally created for an episode of Space Ghost Coast to Coast called "Baffler Meal", where they were the corporate mascots for a fictional fast-food chain called "Burger Trench". The original versions of the trio were prototypes which resembled the future characters, but both Master Shake and Frylock differed in appearance, personality, and voice from their ultimate design. The original name "Teen Hunger Force" refers to the squad's mission to conquer hunger in teens.
"Baffler Meal" did not air for several years, and was not even animated or produced until after the series became popular. Instead, the Space Ghost episode was rewritten as "Kentucky Nightmare", while the trio, along with Carl Brutananadilewski, debuted in "Rabbot", the pilot episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force. A full season consisting of sixteen episodes, including "Rabbot", was put into production shortly thereafter. The series is now one of Adult Swim's most popular shows, and is the only show from the original Adult Swim line-up to still be in production.
In early episodes, the trio were identified by Master Shake as the "Aqua Teen Hunger Force", which solved crimes for money. After a few episodes, this premise and the use of the name by the characters were dropped. The premise was a trick that had been added to appease Cartoon Network executives, who "didn't want to air a show about food just going around and doing random things." In the show itself, Frylock mentions that they stopped fighting crime because "that wasn't making us a whole lot of money".
The show is rated TV-MA in the United States. In Canada, some episodes of the first four seasons were rated 14+ and the rest 18+.
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Famous quotes containing the word production:
“... if the production of any commodity necessitates the sacrifice of human life, society should do without that commodity, but it can not do without that life.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)