Created by Dave Willis and Matt Maiellaro, Aqua Teen Hunger Force was one of the establishing shows of Adult Swim. Debuting at the tail-end of 2000, the show went on to become one of the most enduring series in the programming block, earning twelve seasons, two movies, and an upcoming five-episode come-back series. Ahead of the release of 2007's Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters, the show became even more well-known -- albeit for some unexpected reasons. A marketing campaign involving small light-up replicas of the show's Mooninites turned into a city-wide bomb scare for Boston that resulted in a slew of breathless reporting in mainstream media, the resignation of a Cartoon Network General Manager, and $2 million in fines.
In subsequent years, the incident has been analyzed by academics and teased by the show -- with one episode openly mocking the chaotic fallout being developed but never completed. In memory of the event, Willis, Maiellaro, and Aqua Teen Hunger Force Director/Editor Ned Hastings took part in the 2023 Boston Comedy Festival, even showcasing a never-before-seen episode -- that may never be seen again, according to Willis -- poking fun at the entire controversy. Sitting down with CBR after the event, Dave Willis and Ned Hastings reflected on their memories of the "2007 Boston Mooninite Panic," returning to their old style of animation, and Willis's one regret about the entire situation.
CBR: You guys just came back from the Boston Comedy Festival, which seems like it went well! You're no longer considered enemies of the city.
Dave Willis: Well, I would hope so. It would seem that they have bigger fish to fry. We had a great crowd, and I'm very appreciative. It's funny, I even brought one of the Mooninites up there with me and put the batteries in -- it still works. [When] I was bringing it back through TSA at Logan Airport, the guy searched my bag to look at it. One of the things he said was, "Don't flash this around. This will get you problems up here."
Ned Hastings: He remembered it. "Whatever you do, don't mount that to the bottom of the plane."
Looking back, do you recall your initial reactions to the Boston Controversy when it figuratively exploded?
Ned: Well, I mean, it was a funny thing to me because it wasn't our idea. The marketing campaign, I mean. I don't know about Dave, but I didn't know anything [to do] with it. That's what was funny about it. We were just as surprised as everybody else. We were getting the news trickling in at the same rate that everybody else was -- first it was like, "It's a sticker with a cartoon character flipping people off!" I was like, "Well, that sounds malicious." Then, you know, it was a sign.
Finally, they showed it on the news, and I had seen that light bright before because one of the guys in our office that worked for marketing had one in the window of his office. I [thought, "That's the thing that Trey has!" I ran over to get it and his lights were off. His office was closed, the sun was gone. By that time, it was in the afternoon and everybody was hip to what had happened. I'm sure the marketing people found out about it kind of before it hit the news. But yeah, it sort of unfolded in real time for us too.
Dave: Under a load-bearing beam of a major bridge might not be the best location for something like that. I certainly don't think it was a "hoax," as it was reported in the media. They liked to make it out like it was some malicious thing, I guess. I guess that makes them look slightly less stupid. If someone is calculated, if I try to make this appear to be a bomb, as opposed to just mistaking this stupid thing and then not having anyone under the age of 52 in the office that could possibly explain it. It's not like we were South Park, but we [weren't] that obscure either.
Ned: [Laughing] We did have a movie coming out.
And now you've got this special Boston episode, making fun of the whole thing.
Dave: Now you look at the people, they love it up there. There's one line, after they blow up Meatwad, and Shake [says], "Relax, Frylock, he's in a better place. He's no longer in Boston." They loved it. We had another line where the local anchor in Boston says, "This angered the drunk racist people of Boston." Standards and Practices made us take that one out. It [was] only for a room of 400 people [at the festival]. They paid money to see it. Let's give them every joke.
What was the response at Adult Swim when you guys said you wanted to return to the Boston stuff?
Dave: After it first happened, our boss [Mike Lazzo] at the time told us after the smoke had cleared -- maybe like after a month or so -- I'll let you guys [revisit it]. We were chomping at the bit to get an opportunity to do an episode on it. Our show isn't really satire, you know? So we were trying to approach it in our own oblique way. It wasn't quite there when we were working on it. Mike shut it down, rather than let us sort of go ahead with the rewrite that we had done.
Years later, someone had leaked what we had worked on. That was never intended to ever air, you know, so that was kind of annoying. I don't know when we [rewrote] that -- all this happened in 2007. So that rewrite is probably from 2008 or 2009. The thing that we just recently showed, we didn't change. We just made that as is. That's what's crazy about it -- this Boston episode that aired for that one event? It's not going to air anywhere else ever again. You would think after we finished it, just put it on the pile of episodes but no. We finished it just for those 400 people up in Boston. I guess that's consistent with the balance sheet over [at] "Max Discovery+ One," or whatever it's called now.
Considering that it's very much the script from over fifteen years ago, what would you say is the biggest difference between Aqua Teen Hunger Force now from what it was over fifteen years ago?
Dave: Well, we kind of did it the old way that we used to do the show -- just moving Photoshop files around. It's kind of a labor-intensive process for the editors. I should credit Nick Gibbons, he's one of our editors. He's the one that worked on it. Sometimes we ask editors to make characters out of placeholders, just pull stuff off the internet. We never had board artists like we did for the second movie. This was kind of a window back to how we used to do the show. It was a crazy time. We have to be the only cartoon that's ever existed that never use storyboards. Every behind-the-scenes DVD of an animated movie features like, "This was called the animatic!" We never had an animatic.
Ned: Somebody sent me a video about how Pixar makes their stuff, and they were like, "Hey, this is probably like a lot like how you do it, right?" No!
Dave: The thing I get asked at different events -- and when I say events, I mean like backyard barbecue type things where I've just met somebody, and they [say], "I'm in cement, what do you do?" I [say], "I make cartoons." "So do you draw the cartoons every time?" And I delight and tell them no, we don't draw any. We don't have to. It's the same stuff from 2000 we've reused. I will say that the new season -- and when you say it's a full-blown revival, I think that that's that may be a little bit of a stretch for five episodes, maybe if we were making say ten -- but it is nice to come back to it. It's kind of got a slightly newish look. It's a different process and it kind of got a polished look. We're excited about it.
And through it all, Aqua Teen endures. What is it about this show and these characters that allows them to be timeless like that?
Ned: To me, the enduring part [of Aqua Teen Hunger Force] is just that the characters are just still funny. The interactions are still funny. The characters were designed in such a way where you can just throw any situation in front of them. The lines start bouncing around, [and] the timing just works. The voices still work. Dave and Matt were smart about not being super topical, early on. So you can watch an episode from 2005 and you don't know whether it's from 2005 [or] 2010.
You can't remember which season was which because they just kind of all, you know, they all sort of work on the same level. Now, we do have a different kind of production process now, like Dave was saying. We're working with board artists who are actually doing and creating storyboards, and we're making our animatics that way, as opposed to what you saw on the Boston episode, which [are just] Photoshop files moving around. There's no lip movement [or] anything like that.
Looking back, what do you think is the most ridiculous element of the entire Boston situation?
Dave: I think it was fascinating in the way that it was at a moment in the War on Terror, where it's just very ironic to see like a whole city shut down and tee off on this -- the exact opposite of a threat. It could have been any character but the fact that it was a Mooninites, it's just classic. It was also the media just like it was like -- it's not one of the first viral videos or anything. Certainly, there was a viral nature to this, in an early period of the internet. CNN was doing, doing a little bit on the story. Fox News just kept hammering it. Then you had the tech guys who hung that stuff, they were going to jail. They're making fun of it at every press conference, they're just happy being there, they're just milking their 15 minutes and just turning it into a freak show.
I stand by this today -- I was disappointed that we didn't lean into it more. I mean, we did have a movie to promote, you know? It's like, well, as long as we're getting accused of a hoax, we might as well embrace it right? Send us up to Boston, and we'll have we'll do a screening on the Common, or dump a bunch of milkshakes into the bay and do a whole bit. No one had a sense of humor about it by that afternoon.
I can just imagine having Carl up there, ripping on Boston.
Dave: Carl would have done that. "I would have just razzed them about the Celtics and Bruins."
Aqua Teen Hunger Force's twelfth season is set to debut on Max.