The early 2010s were a golden age for kids’ TV animation. A new generation of storytellers entered the industry in a moment that felt uncharacteristically ready for something fresh. At the forefront of this movement was J.G. Quintel’s Regular Show, a slacker comedy with a surreal bent inspired by Quintel’s college years at CalArts. Although toned down from the short films in which its characters had first appeared, Regular Show represented an effort by Cartoon Network to appeal to an older demographic, gesturing toward topics and experiences that would have been out of place in most of their shows at the time. Now, Regular Show: The Lost Tapes promises to return to that world for old and new fans alike.
Returning to Regular Show Felt Inevitable
The original series built a dedicated fanbase across 8 seasons from 2010 to 2017. While it veered into serialization to a lesser extent than some of its peers, it also used that time to show its characters maturing into more responsible and emotionally capable adults. J.G. Quintel followed Regular Show with Close Enough, an explicitly adult-oriented, marginally less surreal animated series on HBO Max that followed a young couple trying to make sense of adulthood.
Close Enough seemed like a natural follow-up to Regular Show, especially given the way that show’s characters had finally made peace with being adults. It was pretty well received, including by Regular Show fans. Yet, it failed to establish the same kind of cultural cache over its three seasons and was formally canceled in 2022. Given the current state of TV animation, it’s no great surprise that Quintel would return to the adventures of Mordecai the blue jay and Rigby the brown raccoon.
Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Programming
Regular Show: The Lost Tapes offers new adventures that take place ambiguously within the timeline of the original series, seemingly to facilitate a return to disconnected episodic stories without the baggage of continuity. Unfortunately, the end result is a revival without much of an identity of its own. Offering a bit of what people liked from before is honest, and will be exactly what some fans are hoping for. However, in practice, it feels like The Lost Tapes is just going through the motions of what people imagine the show to be.
The format of Regular Show is well established: friends Mordecai (voiced by creator J.G. Quintel himself) and Rigby (William Salyers) find new distractions while working under their boss Benson (Sam Marin) as groundskeepers at a local park, which inevitably snowball into absurdity. It’s a feature, not a bug, and has given the show room to move gracefully between mundane observational humor and surreal comedy. As expected, The Lost Tapes picks this up and runs with it, but it does so through a combination of less exciting episodes and a lack of wit. This feels less like building on what works and more like copying your own homework.
There are exceptions; Mordecai and Rigby are not back at square one. Plus, the revival series does peer into the lives of its other characters, especially Margaret (Janie Haddad Tompkins) and Eileen (Minty Lewis). The Lost Tapes doesn’t promise any other surprises, though.
Maybe a Little Too Regular
Despite its commitment to recreating the mood and style of the original show, The Lost Tapes is missing the sense of time and place that made Regular Show feel so specific. J.G. Quintel drew inspiration from the broader slacker comedy genre and sought to respond to the world around him, creating an animated series that captured millennial malaise in the early 2010s. In attempting to recapture that same mood, The Lost Tapes feels comparatively untethered, coming off less like a period piece and more like a late-season Simpsons episode.
As mentioned, the most disappointing part of The Lost Tapes is that it’s not very funny. The original series was deftly written, with a unique humor shaped by its characters and their interactions that morphed over time into its own language of bits and riffs. Maybe it’s growing pains or an effort to avoid alienating new fans, but this new series doesn’t seem to be on the same wavelength as the original. While it’s not a trainwreck, the vibes of Regular Show are a pretty important piece of the puzzle.
These absences are not all-encompassing, and there are certainly moments where the voice of the original show peeks through. However, that feels like a low bar for a show purporting to slot right into the original run. In fact, Regular Show: The Lost Tapes is basically fine. It’s not a disastrous betrayal of the original series, nor is it so alien as to be unrecognizable. Yet, given that the show is very much about people stuck in patterns of the familiar, it is at least a little strange to see a revival so committed to the same.
