We wrote the pilot in a couple of weeks while working at Castle Rock, and they let us hire our friend Lauren MacMullan to do some designs. We said, “We don’t want it to look too much like Peter Bagge because that’s a little too stylized for TV, but somewhere in a Harvey Kutzman vein.” That’s why the show has those colors that are mis-registered, because it looks like a cheaply-printed comic book.
Weinstein: For the characters, we gave them three different options for the designs — one was sort of a 1930s-looking one and the other two were more realistic and more like Lauren’s natural style.
Oakley: Then came the pitches. At the time, all the networks were looking to do animated stuff. There had been a first wave of The Simpsons imitators — like Fish Police and Capital Critters — but they didn’t understand what made The Simpsons great. Then came a second wave where things were a little more grown-up, like God, the Devil and Bob, Sammy with David Spade and Stressed Eric. We were part of that wave.
We pitched to Fox — but nothing. NBC was considering it, but Warren Littlefield felt that Andy was too much of a loser to be on “Must See TV.” We pitched to the WB when the WB was still a new thing. This was before they discovered they were going to be the teenage girl network. It was sort of a hodgepodge of stuff including The Steve Harvey Show and The Jamie Foxx Show and a whole bunch of other sitcoms and dramas. They didn’t have a brand yet.
The WB was interested, and we turned in the script and the designs. There was a period of waiting around for a couple of months, but then we got the call that they were going to order 13 episodes. We hired a great staff of writers while Lauren began hiring animators.
When the show was announced, it was called The Downtowners. We liked it because it had an early 1960s jet-set kind of thing to it. But six months into the process, MTV came out with an animated show called MTV Downtown. The network was super concerned people might confuse the two, so they made us change it. We went through lots of names and finally settled on Mission Hill, which was already the name of the neighborhood in the show. We weren’t in love with it, but it was okay. We’d come up with “Mission Hill” from the Mission District in San Francisco. We didn’t realize until years later that Mission Hill was a real place in Boston.