How Over the Garden Wall Builds Its World

Please take a moment and honor the cricket in the background who, at 9 in the morning, cricketed with magnificent power through the entirety of recording and so closely aligned his song with my voice that he proved totally resistant to denoising. Honor him. He earned it.

For me, the world of Over the Garden Wall is compelling partly because its weirdness, how it “yields” to the bizarre, never feels random or contrived. It fits. The world and its weirdness feel as though governed by some inscrutable internal logic, invisible to us yet noticeably consistent. Too many “quirky” stories fall prey to what my brother and I call the “LOL random” problem: they feel forced, quirky for quirkiness’s sake. Rare and precious are things like Over the Garden Wall and legendary web series Homestar Runner, whose worlds or humor are peppered with non sequiturs yet feel, in some undefinable way, sensible. My brother and I also watch the show every October, by the way. 🙂 I enjoy and appreciate your videos immensely. Keep up the great work!

I LOVE the Highwayman for exactly the reason you say. Loose ends are what makes the difference between stories I like and stories I love.

My sister was born right after an enormous family tragedy; she is the beauty after the terrible thing. Thank you for a gorgeous video.

Guys wake up new J. Holt the Illustrator video essay just dropped and it’s about one of my favorite pieces of media ever made it’s time to celebrate

The Loose Ends point is my favorite thing you pointed out here. Something at the back of my brain itches over something I think Tolkien or another fantasy author said about the importance of answers raising more questions. I'm glad I'm not the only one noticing that a lot of modern stories feel some kind of need to answer every single question and explore every single nook and cranny. Adventure Time was probably the first time I noticed it, where as the show goes on, every side character gets some arc, every offhand name gets an explanation, every location gets a second look. I mean, the last and biggest bad of the show was mentioned once in an early season as a cool sounding quote. It's not a magic ice crown, it's a broken wishmaking crown made millenia ago by a powerful wizard using arcane circuitry that can be rewired and repaired. It's not a scary ghost lady moving furniture in a haunted house, it's the spiritual manifestation of a past reincarnation trying to communicate with your current self. It's not a magic dog, it's an interdimensional alien shapeshifting parasite offspring. It's something I also see a ton in IP bought out by big companies, too, where every single mysterious thing from some older movie or video game MUST be answered. I have a hard time understanding why. You're right, it makes it all seem smaller, but it's also harder to do and is far less rewarding for all involved. If a character mentions some lost kingdom once and never again, it raises a lot of questions. People talk about it. You get fan theories, you get conversations, you get that bigger world, and you do all this in a single statement. If the same character says an exact location and a date, not only does that in itself take more effort, but so does the upkeep. Now you have to make sure that the location and date are always the same. You need to ensure they don't conflict with anything. And more often than not, you're going to slip up and create some in-lore anachronism or location contradiction unless you have some huge timeline compendium written down and consulted with every single drop of ink on the page. It's exhausting! And the result of doing so is no room for fan theories, no room for speculation, a conversation ended before it started, a smaller world, and likely a continuity that looks more like a pile of ouroboros spaghetti than a nice clean line.

The red mic technic is incredibly silly. Yet now i at last noticed it

This video is a pretty good breakdown of how the worldbuilding works in the show, but I'd actually argue that the loose ends and the general absurdism serve a much bigger purpose for the narrative than what you talked about in the video. For the most part, a lot of these strange, absurd moments are helping to establish the tone of the show. The moment with the turkey is weird, yes, but it's lonely and maybe even a little creepy. Haven't done my yearly rewatch yet, but from what I remember pretty much most of the strangeness is similar in tone, especially towards the beginning of the show. It's being used as a tool to show the viewers how alien The Unknown is from our world, but it also makes you stop questioning things after a while, to the point where you might not even question why Greg and Wirt are there in the first place, where they came from, why they're dressed like that, ect. Which makes the twist even stronger.

Man tells us he doesn’t know anything about music, has a guitar sitting in the background. 😂 Loved the video. Never seen the show. I’ll have to go watch it now.

My family and I watch Over the Garden Wall every October. It sets the mood so well for fall and Halloween.

Wow, those 22 minutes flew by. Beautiful work!

There’s a lot to love about Over the Garden Wall from the art, to the writing, to the music- it’s a veritable American folk tale in every sense of the term! There’s also a lot to love about this video, and as someone in the midst of writing my own world for a graphic novel it was incredibly insightful! Also, as another commenter said- no better video for crickets to insert themselves into the recording!

i first watched this show when i was... maybe 11 years old? really young. i always noticed how it felt different from the other cartoons, a much more complex tone that i wouldn't have understood at the time. looking back on it now, it reminds me of old european folktales; half anthropomorphized animals, mysterious woodland horrors, in general this sense of feeling small in a world of many perils. seeing it now but in a much more introspective light has been a treat, and i'm deeply considering doing another watch of this on halloween! love how it's been a tradition for many people alike.

Drinking Gatorade while listening to this video at 2am is what I am imagine being an artsy Victorian man with wine feels like thank you

just got here, but 10/10 would red microphone again. kept forgetting about it and then getting jumpscared by a png on a music note--

lets not forget that we're all just clinging desperately to the idea that anything can be organized, when in reality chaos is our nature, and inevitably thats what we all crave.

Great video, you explain how they build on their world so well. One thing I especially love about over the garden wall is how short it is. I think something about it's few episodes and runtime, allows its world to be digested compare if it were multiple seasons. It came and went but didn't get forgotten.

Never ceases to amaze how many new things I can learn from something I’ve seen so many times

I feel like over the garden wall is the perfect onion layer metaphor. Honestly feels like more of a October, November, Decemeber holiday show then just soly a spooky Halloween miniseies.

Your wonderful teaching aside Your petty red microphone is what solidified my subscription to you. 💛 But thank you so much for this love letter to Over the Garden Wall. I hope to take your advice and apply it to my own writing