Home Movies (TV Series) - Style

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.