So Long Paul!

Today we say goodbye to Paul Meshreky. A dear friend I first worked with at Paul Frank Industries who joined the Yo Gabba Gabba team at the beginning of Season 2. Paul continued to assistant me through the YGG's off season on merchandise and licensing stuff. Aside from being the most Egyptian friend I've ever had, Paul's a dedicated hard worker, hilarious buddy to everyone, master of the "awkward hug", and voted Most Eligible Coptic Bachelor of the Decade. That's right ladies, the quadruple threat! You might also notice Paul's design work from super cool clothing company, Toddland!

Paul, I miss you already and I wish you the best in your future.

Friends and "Family"

Here at Yo Gabba Gabba, we really do get by "with a little help from our friends". With that said, I'm so glad to announce that the Yo Gabba Gabba "Family" episode is finally available! "Family" is one of my favorites of Season 2. I love this one for many reasons, but particularly as a character designer, I've been anticipating this one for a while because it introduces some new characters to Gabbaland. Muno's Mom, Muno's Dad, his sister Chibo (♥♥♥) and his baby brother Gogo.

Now this is where the friends part comes in. The script called for Muno's Mom to have a purse. The purse has to be functional, fashionable and it also has to magically be able hold items that are larger than itself (like Mary Poppins' carpet bag). The size has to be customized to fit Muno's mom because Gabbaland cyclopses are a bit bigger that normal humans. I happen to have a little bit of background in the accessory world, and I knew that for a cool mom like Muno's, this purse can't just be a prop. So I knew the right person to call...The marvelous, mysterious, mad, mad, mister meaner herself, MISSY BROOME.



I worked alongside Missy many years ago, back in the glory days of Paul Frank Industries. Sidenote: Anybody remember the J & MISSY Cat bag? That's a good example of my art + Missy's pursiness. Anyways, Missy is amazing. She's also worked for Roxy, teaches design at OCC and she's the creator of the world famous HOWDY.

So I called Missy up with our little design project, and instantly she was on it. She whipped up 3 amazing concepts and once we settled on one, she nailed it and quickly shipped it over to us. I was surprised to find that for production purposes, she fashioned two versions. One was normal and the other had a velcro trap-door bottom to solve our "Mary Poppins" issue. Brilliant! The craftsmissyship was impeccable.


She even lined the bags with this far-out polka dot print! Not necessary for a "prop" but this was no prop, this was a cyclops woman's vital fashion accessory! In this shot, Muno's Mom is pulling out all of the items necessary to make lemonade.



Like I said, we really do get by with a little help from our friends. Missy did all of this for us out of the kindness of her (Joan-Jetty-black) heart, asking nothing from us in return. She is just one example of the many dear friends that help us bring this silly little magic show together. We are so thankful for all of them. We love you!

More Missy Broome links:
http://missybroome.com/
http://www.myspace.com/missybroome
http://www.myspace.com/howdymonster

Gooble's Origin

As promised, the following is a little background behind Gooble, the ghostlike mysterious Yo Gabba Gabba character.

Artistically, Gooble's origin began with a song off of the Aquabats 1999 "Vs. The Floating Eye of Death" album called, "Monster's Wedding" The song itself is a ghost story; not unlike Tim Burton's 2005 film, The Corpse Bride. In the song, there is a foreboding ghost's voice saying, "you must go". That ghost's name was Obakemon (which translates to "ghost-man" in Japanese).

I did the graphic design for the "Floating Eye of Death" album and I knew that Obakemon would be a real fun character to illustrate for the inside lyric booklet. Of course, he is what he is in the song, a ghost man. I designed him to emulate the style of my brother Christian's signature red cyclopses that he used to doodle all over the place--which eventually became Muno (but that's another story). In promotion of the album, Obakemon later found himself on Aquabats t-shirts, stickers and jackets. They were mostly glow-in-the dark, cuz you know, he's a ghost!

I really dug Obakemon's sad clown look of misery with his candy red lips. I don't know why, but for some reason it visually appealed to me. When I was working at Paul Frank Industries, I had an Obakemon messenger bag custom made for me that I carried around for years and years.

So then, I believe in 2004, Christian & Scott invited me (with a few others) to the first working Yo Gabba Gabba concept meeting. It was then that they pitched the idea of developing a TV project other than The Aquabat Super Show. This was going to be a character based kids show but pulling from what we had already built in the Aquabats universe. I thought it was a great idea to put some of these characters to better use. Muno, Brobee and Gooble are all characters that have Aquabat roots.

We changed Obakemon's name to Gooble because we liked how it sounded. Besides, Obakemon? American kids don't like them Japanese names fer stuff! They like Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokemon and Apple pie stuff like that!

My job as graphic dude was to help flesh out the early concepts for a pitch. This was Gooble #1:



OK so several years later, we end up making the show. We settle on the 5 main characters, because we just didn't have it in the first season budget to make more! Gooble did survive in a couple of scripts as a minor role, but now he had to be animated. This made me sad because I thought he would look really cool as a live action character.

But then my favorite mistake happened. In the process of making one of the Muno costumes, there was an error, and Muno just didn't turn out right. We spent big dollars on this Muno we simply couldn't use. So, I made this proposal: we take the bad Muno costume, scrape off the bumps and remake it in a Gooble fashion.


...And it worked!


Here, in the episode aptly entitled, "Love", Gooble joins the rest of the cast in a touching rendition of, "Be Nice To Everyone". I personally think this is one of the weirdest moments of Yo Gabba Gabba...and I LOVE it!

Paul Frank Yo Gabba Wallet

Joel Fox models his über sheik Yo Gabba Gabba wallet by Paul Frank™


with his fabulous pants!



Sorry kids, they were for the cast and crew only.