Yahoo News ‘We Ordered a Sh*t Ton of Art Supplies and Made Ourselves Laugh’: Inside Adult Swim’s Puppet-Filled April Fool’s Day Stunt
Any alternative comedy fan knows that Adult Swim’s April Fool’s Day programming is must-see television. The unabashedly weird late night network has turned messing with viewers into an annual tradition, often dropping buzzy new premieres in unexpected ways (like airing the entire “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” movie in a deliberately unwatchable picture-in-picture format) or replacing its existing programming with nonsensical content (like a 2021 stunt in which it satirically rebranded itself as a pre-school channel known as Adult Swim Jr.). Fans have come to expect a lot of Adult Swim on the internet’s least favorite holiday, and 2024 saw the network deliver one of its most viral triumphs to date.
One of the most anticipated shows on Adult Swim’s upcoming slate is Season 2 of “Smiling Friends,” Zach Hadel and Michael Cusack’s animated series about two mid-level employees at a company that promises to cheer up any sad customers who call into its hotline. The show gained a cult following after premiering in 2022, and there has been a palpable sense among fans that the new season was imminent.
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Adult Swim stoked those rumors across its social media channels last week, encouraging viewers to watch on Sunday night with a cryptic series of “Smiling Friends”-centric posts that included a doctored photo advertising the show on the Las Vegas Sphere. But when viewers tuned in expecting new episodes, they received something they couldn’t have possibly known they wanted.
Rather than new “Smiling Friends” stories, the audience were treated to shot-for-shot puppet recreations of three existing episodes. The reskinned episodes featured the same voice acting and hand-drawn backgrounds from the animated show, with hand puppets taking the place of the original characters. The prank concluded with an airing of the first episode of Season 2 and an announcement that the show would return on May 12. The gag went viral in the following days, having been viewed over 25 million times at the time of this writing.
The stunt was orchestrated in part by Jacob Escobedo, Adult Swim’s SVP of Creative who is responsible for maintaining the brand’s offbeat aesthetic outside of its scripted programming. One of his first tasks upon returning to work after the holidays each January is sitting down with a team including VP, On-Air Packaging & Social Media Michael Cahill and VP, Creative Director Gill Austin to plan the year’s April Fool’s Day festivities.
When the trio settled on the “Smiling Friends” idea, they initially wanted to recreate the entire first season with puppets before paring the plan down to three. They used different puppets for each episode, outsourcing the first set to a professional studio before enlisting Adult Swim employees of all stripes to make the other ones by hand.
“The overall idea was there would be a progression, a kind of stepping down in quality of puppets over the course of the night,” Escobedo told IndieWire over Zoom after the surprise episodes aired. “So it kind of started off with a bang with these felted Muppet-style puppets for the first episode. The second was more of a sock puppet with live action characters, and the third was our handmade papier-mâché puppets that we hand-puppeted ourselves.”
While Escobedo and his collaborators hoped that making the puppets themselves would lower the stunt’s production value, he quickly found that his team of amateur puppeteers was better suited to the job than he ever imagined. Plans to amuse viewers with deliberately poor craftsmanship gave way to something even more special: Amusing them with puppets that genuinely resemble the charmingly lo-fi cartoon.
“We sat in a room and ordered a shit ton of art supplies and sat in there for weeks and just made ourselves laugh,” he said. “What’s funny is, when we first set out to do it we were like ‘Everybody, you need to make really shitty puppets.’ And we have a lot of creative people who just couldn’t make shitty puppets. All the puppets turned out really incredibly, so our original concept of stepping down the quality of the puppets didn’t really take because the in-house team did such a good job.”
The fact that an unannounced TV event airing at midnight could resonate with so many fans is a testament to the unique space that Adult Swim occupies in the cultural landscape. Shifting consumer behavior has prompted many legacy cable networks to de-prioritize their linear channels, which are often reduced to little more than brand-building exercises that direct viewers to streaming products. Adult Swim has taken the opposite approach, continuing to embrace its status as Cartoon Network’s after hours programming block and using the live broadcast format to surprise its loyal viewers.
Escobedo explained that Adult Swim’s continued embrace of linear broadcasting stems from the same principle that drives its commitment to handmade puppets and animations. Both decisions are a result of the idiosyncratic network’s insistence on staying true to its core values, regardless of which way the entertainment industry shifts.
“It’s sort of the core of who we are, just having a voice in that space. And being so different in that space is super important,” he said. “I think what has kept us alive so long and the reason it’s such an interesting brand still is that there are people behind the brand touching everything. As people move away from handmade things, we’re hand-making most everything on our air. The quality of that really comes through, and the charm of that is really important.”
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