Please know that I’m not at all suggesting they somehow “stole” these ideas. But now I had a project: I went through my collection to find examples of the kinds of things McHale might have had in mind for different parts of the show. And that makes sense since each one is supposed to be a different mini-adventure in a different part of the Unknown. Some episodes show a stronger influence than others. Christ Tsirgiotis called them weird! He knows my name! Then The Art of Over the Garden Wall came out, and it confirmed what was pretty obvious by this point: McHale had used a lot of these old cards even back when he was pitching the show. And that’s a pretty popular card, too - so much that people have even made actual models of it - so it’s no stretch that McHale had seen it.
The shape of the cut in the watermelon, the multiple layers for seats, the cucumber wheels, the gourds/headlight/mirror-things, even the way they turned the stem into a crank, I mean even the camera/viewpoint angle: it was a plain match. I saw old John Crops and his vegetable/fruit car, and I knew it couldn’t just be a coincidence. Then I finally watched “Tome of the Unknown,” the first pilot made by Patrick McHale (creator) and Nick Cross (art director). I didn’t make that connection the first time I saw the miniseries.īut the next year when I was browsing through my old Halloween cards, it hit me how similar a lot of the images used in OTGW were to the things I share. Those are the same things I love about vintage postcards. Over the Garden Wallearns its charm from a mix of nostalgia, mystery, and humor.