Fungus Among Us

A break from move-related not-blogging, to bring you the following piece of animation recently discovered on YouTube:



Fungus Among Us was a Cartoon Network pilot created in 2002 by Wes Archer, who was one of the original Simpsons directors, a director on Futurama - where I met him - and, for a long time, supervising director on King of the Hill. And I think he might be doing the same on the new Mike Judge show on ABC, The Goode Family, but don't quote me on that - I'll find out on Wednesday when it debuts.

When Cartoon Network greenlit the Fungus pilot, Wes was working at Rough Draft Studios on Futurama. He wanted some help with the script, so he turned to me and Rich Moore (supervising director on Futurama), and we aided him in fine-tuning things. This was a thrill for me, because this pilot was my first on-screen writing credit. After the pilot aired, CN put Fungus back into development, and we spent the next several months writing and re-writing several more pilots which never made it past the storyboard stage, and eventually, the network passed. Nevertheless, it was a great experience, and I learned an awful lot about the development process at the network level. And, perhaps most importantly, it taught me that you have to pick your battles, because I wanted to fight every change - and that's just not the way it works. Ah, the naivete of youth.

-EB