Have you watched Bottom’s Butte? This was a fun short / pilot I produced on over at Cartoon Network Studios development department with creator Minty Lewis (Regular Show).
We made this awhile ago, but so much history of how shows get made gets swept under the carpet during production (mostly because you just don’t have time). I figured I’d collect some Bottom’s Butte trivia / facts / history and post it before it got lost forever…
Originally, the show was called “Bottom’s Up!” The title and a lot of other changes were made to make it more appropriate for kids. Earlier, the “Gordo-Slusho” was called the “Daquiride”, so we had to make that a non-alcoholic name. We also had to change the color of the pool water to green to not resemble pee – it was originally yellow green (that’s also where basil-lemonade came from; it was originally just lemonade).
The original accident that causes her to act like a teenager was her getting hit in the head by a telephone book (not her hair bun being too tight). I can’t remember why that change was asked for – maybe the telephone book hit was too violent and they didn’t like the idea of a kids show about brain damage?
Another change we made was to make the whole world all animals (with the exception of Peanette who is a peanut). The original pitch had humans and animals living together.
Lots of people commented on youtube about being hard to understand the lyrics at the beginning – we had a version we worked on that had a kind of kareoke lyric subtitles at the bottom at one point. I can’t remember why we didn’t use that.
This was the first Cartoon Network animated short we got to work with Tony Hale (Veep, Arrested Development) on – and he was amazing. I had been working with Linda Lamontagne (Family Guy) to cast most of the CN shorts and we were trying to get Tony on many of these, and finally we worked it out! He was the perfect Gordon. In fact, the whole cast was incredible. I can’t remember how we got Busy Philipps cast as Beverly – she either knew Minty or was a friend of a friend kind of thing? She was the best.
I’ve got to say – I love the final product, but I also wish people could have seen the original storyboard that Minty pitched. It was more edgy and much more Minty. We had to tone things down a bit to be more K6-11 friendly (where the show was geared to at the time of production). It’s just part of the business of making a potential series, but her original show pitch idea totally could have existed on an Adult Swim right next to Rick and Morty.
So if you haven’t seen it, please give it a watch and send Minty a tweet if you dig it. I know she’d love that! If you have any questions on how it was made, leave a comment and I’ll try to answer when I can.
nate funaro 