Two Slackers and Everything on Fire
Mordecai and Rigby should have been fired weeks ago. They’re groundskeepers at a city park managed by a talking gumball machine, and they are spectacularly bad at the job—not in a tragic way, just in the way of two guys in their early twenties who would genuinely rather do anything else. Their coworkers include a muscle-bound yeti, a being that appears to be an ambulatory brain tumor, and a ghost who communicates primarily through high-fives. The apartment they share is a monument to avoidance. Dead animals get thrown around in the street as a legitimate recreational activity. This is the premise of Regular Show, and somehow it sustains itself across dozens of episodes without once feeling thin.
J. G. Quintel—who also voices Mordecai—has the specific gift of keeping the stakes cosmically high while the characters remain resolutely small. Every episode begins in the mundane and escalates toward apocalypse, usually within seven minutes. Mordecai and Rigby have to beat a universe record against enormous flying heads or everything ends. They have to defeat the Party God. They have to rescue their friends from the internet, which turns out to be controlled by a vicious grandmother. The world catches fire. Psychic debris rains down. Everyone is fine by the following Tuesday.
Ren & Stimpy rewired my brain one Saturday morning at a time. Rocko’s Modern Life raised an entire generation of creatively maladjusted adults. The Adventure Time scripts I’d read to my future children as bedtime stories, consequences be damned. Regular Show belongs in that lineage—the cartoon that refuses to behave, that treats stupidity as a structuring principle rather than a failure state. Critics reach for Beavis and Butt-Head as the comparison, and it’s not wrong, but Regular Show is warmer and stranger than that. There’s real affection for these two useless idiots.
The show has been on Cartoon Network since 2010, a third season already on the way, and it hasn’t lost the thread. The reason it works is that Mordecai and Rigby aren’t cautionary tales. They’re portraits. I would rather play video games than do almost anything on my to-do list. I have participated in staring contests as a serious competitive endeavor. I have eaten candy for dinner and considered it a personal victory. The show understands that this isn’t a character flaw awaiting correction—it’s just a life being lived sideways, at approximately half speed. What a life.