'2 in the Am Pm' Timeline: from 2006 Indie Short to Iconic Franchise
By Robert Thorne
The path from student short to network flagship was not straightforward. In 2008, Cartoon Network launched The Cartoonstitute, an internal incubator initiative led by Craig McCracken and Rob Sorcher designed to discover inventive pilot shorts without the commercial pressures of traditional focus grouping. Quintel, by then working as a storyboard director on The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack, saw his opening.
| Milestone | Key Creative Evolution | Distribution Platform |
|---|---|---|
| 2006: "2 in the AM PM" | Human clerks face an accidental LSD trip; introduction of prototype Benson voice and Mordecai visual cues. | CalArts screening; indie animation festivals; early YouTube uploads. |
| 2008: Cartoonstitute Pilot | Characters fully reimagined as anthropomorphic animals and objects (Mordecai, Rigby, Benson) battling over a sofa. | Cartoon Network internal showcase; un-aired online archive pilot. |
| 2010, 2017: Regular Show Broadcast | Substances replaced with sugar, soda, and coffee; cosmic stakes balance mundane park groundskeeper chores. | Cartoon Network linear cable; international syndication; streaming on Max. |
| 2020, 2022: Close Enough | Quintel returns to explicit adult themes, domestic parenting struggles, and millennial domestic anxiety. | HBO Max exclusive series. |
To pitch the show to executives, Quintel did something unusual: he integrated characters from several of his independent student shorts. He pulled the aristocratic lollipop character Pops from his 2005 short The Naive Man from Lollygland, merged him with the gas station duo from "2 in the AM PM", and introduced Rigby the raccoon to give Mordecai a dedicated comedic foil. When The Cartoonstitute collapsed as an initiative, Regular Show was one of only two pilots selected for a full series greenlight, alongside JG's colleague Peter Browngardt's Secret Mountain Fort Awesome.
Robert Thorne covers electric vehicle innovations, autonomous driving systems, global mobility trends, and automotive engineering developments.
