How’d This Get Online?

In November of 1999, Ric de Barros and Chris Gough (webmasters of the You Can't Do That On Television website) brainstormed ways to expand the website with more content. Because Ric had already animated scenes from the show using the cast members' likenesses as they appeared in You Can't Do That In Comics, they decided to develop an online animated version of the show called You Can't Do That Online. The show was set to be the very first original animated web series, and the two formed Bargo Productions.

They quickly threw together a trailer and began writing scripts for the series. "The drawings were less than spectacular," recalls Ric, who drew all the characters and sets. "Neither of us really knew how to draw, but South Park was at its peak because of its simplicity when we produced How'd This Get Online?, so it all kind of worked out as we were developing the content."

"We wrote the first couple of scripts during the holidays of 1999, and by January, we were ready to start production," Chris says. "But we felt that for this the series to really fly, Les Lye would have to be part of it because you can't get just anyone to play Barth or Senator Prevert."

The duo decided to press their lucks and ask Les Lye, who played every adult male character on the original series, if he would be willing to participate. He had to decline per the guidelines of his actor's union, so they regrouped and decided to scratch the You Can't Do That Online idea in favor of something more original. With reality TV in its prime, they chose to make the show more about the backstage antics of the cast with the "skits" from their low-budget online show as segues to move the story along.

"YCDTOTV was sort of like that also," Ric explains, "but we expanded the concept by writing full-blown behind-the-scenes storylines. We also added continuity by having each episode's plot evolving from what happened in the episode before it."

With changes to the show's format came changes to the scripts that they had already written. As Chris recalls, "we had to write a completely new premiere episode to establish the new format, but we had already written pretty solid material for the first two episodes and didn't want to completely toss it, so we just moved the pilot episode to number three and left the second one in place with very little rewriting, which is why those two episodes are the most like You Can't Do That On Television."

But there was another problem; Ric had already replicated all of the sets from the animated production. "I had drawn a ton of sets from YCDTOTV," Ric remembers, "and I was a complete amateur. It took me probably ten times longer to draw something than someone who was a real artist or animator, so we left them in place and kind of joked in the scripts that they were leftover sets from a previous show."

By the time they wrote episodes four and five, they felt they should probably stop using the YCDTOTV sets since their show had gone a totally different direction, so they took a short break from releasing new episodes to write and produce the first HTGOL episode with all original sets. During this time, they analyzed the web traffic and message board complaints, and it became apparent that the public was not yet ready for streaming video.

"Our show was way ahead of its time in a couple of ways. One - we were in our early twenties and not yet mature enough to handle it, and two - we started developing in the age of dial-up internet access and almost ten years before YouTube," Ric states. "Despite the Animation Magazine plug, it was hard for us to find an audience that could stream the episodes without constant buffering." They decided to cease production during the development of episode six to focus on smaller projects.