It is written in the Book of Stimpy
January 10, 2025 12:39 PM   Subscribe

Joi Massat has collected every cartoon show bible they could find on archive.org and collected them here. Some of these were used to pitch their shows, some were used during production, but all offer an insight into the making of their shows. A handful of highlights (many more links at the site and inside this post): Adventure Time, Dungeons & Dragons, He-Man internal and selling to networks, Batman TAS, Gravity Falls early and later, The Real Ghostbusters Season 2 and Ren & Stimpy (very thorough).

Of note, many of these bibles were uploaded by the creators themselves, for example Johnny Bravo's upload is credited to the character's creator Van Partible.

Some more highlights: Aaahh! Real Monsters, Sam & Max, Gumball, Amphibia, DuckTales reboot 2014, 2015, 2017, Ed, Edd & Eddy, The Fairly OddParents mini and revised, The Ghost and Molly McGee, He-Man 2002, Invader Zim, Johnny Bravo Season 1 and Season 2 (sorta), Kim Possible, The Loud House, The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack, My Life as a Teenage Robot, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic 2008, 2009 and Equestria Girls, The Owl House, Rugrats pitch and writer's bible, Spongebob pitch 1 and pitch 2, Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go, Thomas & Friends, Wander Over Yonder and The Wild Thornberrys pitch 1 and pitch 2.
posted by JHarris (21 comments total) 56 users marked this as a favorite
 
A further note, some of these documents come from an early point in the show's pitching or production, and contain elements that changed as their show developed during production. Like in Sam & Max, in this version of the document, the character of The Geek is male; Amphibia is still called Amphiland and has no traces of the show's overarching plot involving King Andreas; Johnny Bravo Season 2 has many replaced characters from what made it to air; and The Owl House changed quite a bit during its time on air.
posted by JHarris at 12:42 PM on January 10 [3 favorites]


Ack: the selling-to-networks link for He-Man is incorrect. It should go here.
posted by JHarris at 12:53 PM on January 10


Why would you call it The Real Ghostbusters when they were so obviously, so painfully not the real Ghostbusters?
posted by Lemkin at 12:58 PM on January 10 [2 favorites]


*eyes the Super Monkey Team Hyperforce Go bible*

"created by Ciro Neili and Kent Osborn"

I sure do feel like Ricky Garduno should have a credit in there too but I guess that's another bridge Ciro burnt.
posted by egypturnash at 12:59 PM on January 10 [1 favorite]


Why would you call it The Real Ghostbusters when they were so obviously, so painfully not the real Ghostbusters?

To put Filmation in their place. (No, seriously - Filmation tried to cash in on the Ghostbusters hype by using one of their 70s live action shows to produce an 80s cartoon with the Ghostbusters name...and so they called the actual spin-off The Real Ghostbusters as a "fuck you" to Norm and Lou.)
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:05 PM on January 10 [6 favorites]


I can't speak to that, egypturnash. I didn't create or upload any of these.

Lemkin, there's a whole history of why the show is called The Real Ghostbusters. The original Ghost Busters was a live-action Filmation kiddie show from 1975, predating the Ghostbusters movie with Bill Murray by nine years. When the movie became big big business, Filmation made their own animated revival of their show, which as the original creators of the name were entitled to do. When DIC got the license to make their own Ghostbusters based off of the hit movie, they differentiated it from Filmation's Ghost Busters cartoon by calling it The Real Ghostbusters, even though they didn't have the rights to the likenesses of the actors. So they created their own subtly different versions of the characters of Peter Venkman, Ray Stanz, Egon Spengler, Winston Zeddemore and Janine Melnitz. (Slimer is mostly as he was in the movie, although a bit more playful and slightly less gross.)

Anyway, that concludes my lecture on the basis of the Real Ghostbusters, and I didn't even have to mention J. Michael Straczynski!
posted by JHarris at 1:07 PM on January 10 [12 favorites]


Why would you call it The Real Ghostbusters when they were so obviously, so painfully not the real Ghostbusters?

They addressed this in an episode! The Ghostbusters from the movie were actors, the Ghostbusters on the show were intended to be the real guys that the movie was based on. They also chose this title to differentiate the cartoon from Filmation's Ghostbusters, which was not based on the movie at all but rather on Filmation's short-lived 1975 live-action TV series "The Ghost Busters" starring Larry Storch and Forrest Tucker.

Apparently Columbia Pictures had to write Filmation a check to use the name of the older series without licensing the rights to the TV show, so Filmation took that as permission to go ahead and make a competing Ghostbusters cartoon that beat The Real Ghostbusters to air by about a week.

(On preview, what JHarris and NoxAeternum said.)
posted by Strange Interlude at 1:08 PM on January 10 [7 favorites]


Aaahh! Real archives!

This is so so so so cool and I can't wait to pore over each one of these. I've never even heard of The Owl House before and I'm still super excited to see its bible.

I love this stuff. I'm so glad the documents found their way to archive.org, and I'm so glad Joi Massat catalogued them for us.

Thank you so much for posting this, JHarris! You have made my Friday fabulous.
posted by kristi at 1:14 PM on January 10 [4 favorites]


Yay, I'm glad you like it! But really all the work was done by Joi Massat, I just linked to what they found.
posted by JHarris at 1:34 PM on January 10


jharris > I can't speak to that, egypturnash. I didn't create or upload any of these.

Oh yeah, I'm not blaming you for this in any way. I used to work with Ciro.
posted by egypturnash at 1:51 PM on January 10 [2 favorites]


NOT The REAL Ghostbusters - The History of Filmation GHOSTBUSTERS

tldr: After the original legal stuff was settled, Filmation even tried to license the movie Ghostbusters back for an animated series but their corporate parent Westinghouse didn't want to spend the money because they already had their own ghostbusters at home.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 1:59 PM on January 10 [3 favorites]


The My Little Pony Bible gets Twilight Sparkle's name wrong. Jeez guys I'm going to need you to take your magical cartoon horse lore a bit more seriously.
posted by The_Vegetables at 2:17 PM on January 10 [2 favorites]


That book of PONY comes from a time in the shows development before TS's name was finalized.
posted by JHarris at 2:48 PM on January 10 [3 favorites]


I worked at Frederator for many years and perused a few of these in the flesh, so to speak. Thanks for sharing!
posted by Captaintripps at 3:05 PM on January 10 [1 favorite]


There goes my weekend. This is a delightful peek into the history behind some amazing (and some mediocre) shows. Thank you for sharing it!
posted by subocoyne at 3:16 PM on January 10


That Adventure Time book is early indeed. Apparently Princess Bubblegum was going to be named "Betty", and it was fundamental that she & Marceline have a great rivalry, although in actuality the show spent a long time before developing anything about that. It describes several episode ideas--none of which were made. Pretty wild.

I also thought it was weird that it says a lot of things about Jake, but not that he has stretchy magic powers (displayed in some pictures, though).
posted by polecat at 3:16 PM on January 10 [4 favorites]


Nice, Captaintripps! Federator's made some great cartoons!

The Adventure Time bible I've seen before. It seems to come from before, or early on, in the Cartoon Network show, but after the Nickelodeon pilot where Finn was named Pen.

Most of the bibles have story pitches for episodes. Many of them have episodes that would later be made. Ren & Stimpy's has complete scripts that 90% made it to air. (Stimpy's Invention! Space Madness! The Royal Canadian Order of Kilted Yaksmen!) Others have story prompts that were subsequently ignored.
posted by JHarris at 3:39 PM on January 10 [2 favorites]


This is one of the coolest things ever posted on MeFi.
I'm not joking.
Thank you.
posted by signal at 3:44 PM on January 10 [3 favorites]


From the Batman TAS bible:
We'll say it here first--in the run of our series, we will do NO STORIES ABOUT BATMAN'S ORIGIN. Nothing about his parents' murder, the film they saw at the movies before they were shot, the theatre usherette who happened to see them go into Crime Alley seconds before the gun went off, etc., etc... if you're thinking up stories along those lines, flush them.
Smart move.
posted by Halloween Jack at 4:21 PM on January 10 [6 favorites]


What a treasure trove! Nice find, JHarris! I'll admit I did go and scan for Scooby-Doo!, but alas, my favorite Great Dane didn't make the cut. But that's okay, I know way more about Scooby than I'll ever need. Joi did do a 50 year Scooby retrospective back in 2019!
posted by valkane at 5:18 PM on January 10 [1 favorite]


The first MLP bible does make interesting reading, obviously before a lot of things were finalized. Set in Fillydelphia instead of Ponyville, Pinkie Pie as pegasus and Fluttershy as earth pony, Big McIntosh as Big Apple, etc, etc…
posted by McCoy Pauley at 11:37 AM on January 11 [1 favorite]


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