One of the coolest parts of having our story made into an episode was that the crew made such an effort to include us in every part of the process. Before the January trip to L.A. for the story meeting, we were sent the first draft of the script (essentially a story treatment), and then in March we received the final script. Later on, we were sent a copy of the storyboards (fascinating for Thirteen, now that she wanted to be an animator), and then a VHS of the rough cut of the show (more on that in a later entry).

There was even talk at one point of the three of us recording our own voices for our characters, but sadly that didn’t happen, and we wound up being voiced by the show’s cast. (It wasn’t until fairly recently, when I read the episode’s Tiny Toon Adventures Wiki page, that I found out which actress had voiced each of us. Assuming that listing is accurate, my stand-in was the awesome Cree Summer, who also voiced Elmyra.)

One of the more frequent questions I’ve gotten over the years is how much of the “meta” material (the cameos by Spielberg and the three of us, etc.) was from our original story. The answer is, pretty much none of it. Other than the core story of Buster and Babs’ vacation, the only other material that was taken from those original drawings was the bit about the History of Q-tips, which was a fake cover page I made for one part of the story, poking fun at a previous teacher of mine who had a reputation for being boring. (I kind of hope now that he never figured out that was supposed to be him. Thirteen could be ruthless sometimes.)

I think the writers made a good choice, though, in including the behind-the-scenes-type gags. Aside from the fun we got out of actually being in the episode (how many people get to say they were once literally cartoon characters?), it made the story behind the episode part of the episode, in a way that I think made the whole thing hold up better. If all that material hadn’t been in there, and they’d just made our relatively simple story of Buster and Babs’ vacation hijinks, I doubt it would have held up well, and it would have just been a footnote of “oh yeah, that was that episode those kids wrote, that’s why it’s not that great.”

(Of course, maybe it still has that footnote, but if so, don’t care.)

A sampling of the treatment, script, and storyboards for the opening scenes…

Story treatment pages

Script pages

Storyboard pages