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Official Site: Soup 2 Nuts

Home Movies is a dialogue-driven American animated series that originally aired from 1999 to 2004. The plot surrounds an eight-year-old Brendon Small (voiced by the creator, head writer, and lead musician of Home Movies, Brendon Small), who makes films with his friends Melissa Robbins and Jason Penopolis in his spare time. He lives with his divorced mother, Paula, and his baby sister, Josie. He is also friends with his alcoholic, short-tempered soccer coach, John McGuirk.

Home Movies was produced by Soup2Nuts. It originally aired on the UPN network but was canceled after the first season. The show was then picked up by Cartoon Network, and was the first program to be aired on the Sunday night block of the original Adult Swim animation showcase. As part of Adult Swim, it finished the first season and was picked up for three more. It can currently be seen in reruns. It also ran on YTV in Canada.

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.

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