The series was the brainchild of writer and animator Loren Bouchard and comedian Brendan Small. In aesthetic and comedic approach, it followed in the footsteps of the Comedy Central series Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist, on which Bouchard had worked. The first season of Home Movies featured Katz’s swimming Squigglevision animation and some of the same cast members, including standup H. Jon Benjamin and Jonathan Katz himself. Home Movies also borrowed Katz’s approach of reverse-engineering animation from extended audio tracks. Whereas Katz integrated recordings of real-life standup routines, Home Movies was fully built off of dialogue improved from very loose scenarios. The show ran on broadcast channel UPN for a few episodes before being picked up by Cartoon Network, who wanted to include the show in a new block of late-night cartoons catering to adults. Thus, in 2001, Home Movies became the very first series to air on Adult Swim.
While Home Movies helped define the house style of Adult Swim, it differs significantly from better-known early offerings like Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, Harvey Birdman, and Sealab 2021 in that it resembles more traditional sitcoms. The action revolves around 4th grader Brendan Small, who films hundreds of elaborately conceived movies in his basement with his friends Jason (Jon Benjamin) and Melissa (Melissa Bardin Galsky). Making movies is all Brendan seems to be interested in, often turning them in instead of papers in school, to the chagrin of his single mother Paula (first Paula Poundstone, then Janine Ditullio), with whom he has a charmingly dysfunctional relationship.
The kids’ filmography includes both absurdly ambitious projects and extremely haphazard ones (I like throwaway stuff like “O ‘Pinion Where Art Thou,” about a man who goes to a psychiatrist because he has no opinions about anything.) The bigger productions usually feature original music by the de facto fourth member of the crew: Dwayne, the guitarist, singer, and bandleader of Skab. (The show’s music was written and performed by Small, with help from Bouchard.)
His towering achievements include a musical based on Kafka’s Metamorphosis, the complete score for the space opera “Starboy and the Captain of Outer Space,” and a Tommy ripoff called “Timmy.”