The Legacy of Legacy
10 years ago today, on the 10th anniversary of the Eddsworld YouTube channel, we released The End (Part 2). As I logged out of Edd’s channel for the last time, the 4-year journey of Eddsworld: Legacy came to a close, and I finally began to process everything that had happened. With a decade now gone by, I’d like to think I’m done processing and ready to open up a little. Today, I thought it’d be interesting/cathartic to look back at Legacy and let you in on how it went down, why certain things happened the way they did, and how I feel about it all now.
I’ve already talked about the day Edd died, and the day after (when I was contractually obligated to be on set shooting an ill-timed comedy sketch), so the story of Legacy truly begins two days after we lost Edd. It was March 27th, 2012, and Matt and I had met up in my apartment to write and record the announcement that Edd was gone. After no less than 20 takes, sat in front of a camera trying to get through a statement that now felt over-rehearsed and robotic, a bus sounded its horn outside my window and ruined what would be the final attempt. After I hurled a glass at the wall, we agreed to simply narrate the announcement to preserve our sanity (and my remaining glassware).
The original announcement was more — let’s say — honest. Perhaps brutally so. The situation was shocking and unfair, and our words reflected that. But with each draft, we received more feedback from Edd’s family asking us to soften the blow, and so we did. I came up with the line “Edd may be gone, but his world will keep on spinning” to imbue a sense of optimism that, in all honesty, felt wholly alien to us at the time. Matt and I shared the responsibility of breaking the news to not just Edd’s friends but also all of you, and the pressure to get that announcement out was immense. I wish we’d had more time.
March 28th, 2012 — RIP Edd Gould
Immediately after releasing “RIP Edd Gould”, Matt and I sat with Edd’s mum and we were told that he wanted the show to continue on without him. Edd had never mentioned this to us, nor had anything been written down, so what happened next was a series of well-meaning but hasty decisions made in a moment where I felt so powerless in the face of grief that I’d do anything to regain a sense of control.
Sue (Edd’s mum) told us we could use the profits of the show to continue it indefinitely but — admittedly without even consulting Matt — I shot that idea down and proposed an alternative: we would crowdfund the budget for a final year of Eddsworld and donate all of the show’s revenue to charity before putting it to rest. Not only was that a more achievable, reasonable commitment but I figured being upfront about the show’s budget and where 100% of the takings were going would prevent anyone from making the cruel but predictable claim that we were somehow “profiting” off of Edd’s death. Haha. Ha.
June 2nd, 2012 — Space Face (Part 1)
In 2011, shortly after Hammer & Fail (Part 2), I brought Edd the first half of the script for Space Face. Obviously, with him in and out of chemotherapy appointments and hospital stays, the unparalleled workflow he had historically stuck to had become unfeasible, so it was time for my newly minted production company to step up. To lighten Edd’s workload, we decided that — at least for now — Eddsworld would become a TurboPunch production and I would handle the writing, direction, and production management of the show (including overseeing music, sound design, etc). All Edd needed to do was animate when he felt up to it and add in extra gags where he saw fit. This is why the only Legacy-era episode you’ll see the words “a TurboPunch production” on is Space Face (Part 1), because that was the only episode for which Edd had agreed to that designation.
To this day, it’s always funny to me when I see the commonly held belief that “you can tell exactly when Tom took over the writing during Space Face” because… I wrote the whole thing. By February 2012, I’d finished the full script, received Edd’s sign-off, and — in a brief window between hospital stays — he’d begun working on the episode. Unfortunately, as you likely know, Edd would die just 3 minutes into the animation and Paul — Edd’s close friend and my unexpected flatmate — would complete the remaining scenes Edd had recorded dialogue for.
Like me, Paul had moved to London in late 2011 specifically to work more closely with Edd. I’d rented a flat for Edd and I to share once his cancer had gone back into remission and an old friend was filling Edd’s room in the meantime. Paul, however, was supposed to be living in the Gould family home — at least to begin with — but due to Edd’s declining health and high risk of infection, Paul and his partner suddenly found themselves crammed into the small office of my flat. The day he moved in was the day we met.
Paul had spent the weeks following Edd’s death meticulously refamiliarising himself with Eddsworld so he could emulate Edd’s style as closely as possible. However, it quickly became apparent that doing so was not just artistically challenging — as Edd’s work was ever-changing and consistently inconsistent — but also extremely emotionally taxing — as Edd was… Well… Dead. The idea of remaining “visually consistent” with Edd’s earlier work was promptly abandoned as it was simply too painful for us to try and carry on as if nothing had happened. Paul and I agreed that whatever came next would be a tribute to Edd’s world, not an attempt at replicating it.
I can’t speak for Paul but I can attest that, even as a writer, asking myself “what would Edd do” before every keystroke was emotionally and creatively devastating. If you’re an artist, imagine forcing your hand to draw like someone else. Now imagine forcing it to draw like your close friend who has just died. Could we have brought on some fans or freelancers to emulate Edd’s style perfectly? Probably. But we were all fantastically protective and weren’t ready to trust anyone else with our friend’s show just yet. Truth be told, we weren’t ready for anything that was about to happen.
June 8th, 2012 — Eddsworld: Legacy (fundraiser)
As soon as Space Face (Part 1) was out, it was time to formally announce Eddsworld: Legacy. None of us had worked on something of this scale before so we guesstimated a recklessly barebones budget of £30,000 based on — what we very ambitiously believed to be — only a year’s worth of work. Four 8-to-10-minute episodes and four 1-to-2-minute shorts. £12,000 for Paul, £6,000 for me, £2,400 for backgrounds, etc. If you’ve never worked in animation or the arts, just trust me when I say that anyone who has likely cringed pretty hard while reading that.
Thanks to the humbling generosity of Edd’s audience, the fundraiser brought in a little over £50,000 but, by the time Legacy was done, I had matched that figure again out of my own pocket just to pay people the bare minimum. In the end, after our 1-year timeline had ballooned into 4, we’d released six 8-to-10-minute episodes & seven (don’t say it) 1-to-2-minute shorts and had spent around £110,000 doing so. Financially and managerially, the whole thing was a trainwreck.
In hindsight, I have no idea what any of us were thinking. Perhaps the fear of being seen as money-driven and, again, “profiting” off of our friend’s death pushed me to recommend settling on salaries well below the cost of living. As I said earlier, well-meaning but hasty decisions made in the face of grief. Either way, it was my own naivety that put us in that situation and I won’t pretend otherwise.
People have asked me what I regret most about Legacy, or what I’d do differently, and it’s this: I would rather have silently and exclusively spent my own money keeping the show going than entered into the agreement with the audience that I did. The mental, social, and professional cost of that fundraiser was far, far greater than the money it raised. Knowing what I know now — that the allegations of profiteering would come no matter what I did — I wish I’d just taken the full financial responsibility from the get-go. It simply wasn’t worth it.
That said, I am still incredibly grateful for the generosity and patience shown by the 1,269 backers; I never want that to be misunderstood. What I regret is my decision to enter into a transactional agreement with the larger audience, how I handled the stress and obligation that came with that decision, and the childlike hubris with which I cobbled together that budget.
It took a long time to make good on all the promises made in that IndieGoGo, with some of them only coming together at the very end of Legacy, almost 4 years later. A poster (and a wristband) illustrated by Paul and signed by us all; a soundtrack assembled by Eddie Bowley and I with cover art by Katey Harding; a behind-the-scenes documentary created by Elliot Gough; the Toaster Brains 2 comic book compiled and designed by Maddy Vian; custom portraits by Paul and later also Kati Knitt; and lastly a personal thanks video from Tom, Eddie, Matt, and Tim Hautekiet.
There was also an Eddsworld DVD proposed as a stretch goal and funded exclusively by Cyanide and Happiness’ Rob DenBleyker, but Rob agreed to let me roll that money into the animation budget as Legacy progressed.
September 12th, 2012 — Date Night
With the fundraiser done and Space Face (Part 2) underway, we put together Date Night to quell the near-immediate hounding for new material and accusations that we (well, I) had simply taken the money and run. The short was born from a script I’d originally penned as a live-action sketch for my channel. If anything from Legacy is to be accused of “not feeling like Eddsworld”, it should be this, as it wasn’t even written for Eddsworld to begin with.
Katey ‘Red’ Harding was one of the higher-tier fundraiser backers and also a go-to artist for us at the time, having illustrated a number of Eddsworld comics in 2011, and so we used her likeness for the co-star of the short. It was also around this time that Katey and I embarked on bringing the Super Average comic (which Edd and I had begun planning) to life. Shamefully, that comic would be one of the first projects to fall victim to my newfound habit of overpromising, becoming overwhelmed, and promptly burying my head. Finding me unresponsive, Katey continued churning out pages as a labour of love before packing up their online presence altogether.
November 26th, 2012 — Space Face (Part 2)
For me, this is where Legacy truly begins, and the tonal/creative shift from (what the fans have dubbed) the classic/”Goulden” era of Eddsworld becomes inarguable. Visually, the most obvious change was the shift to Paul’s art style, defined by cleaner, slender character designs and more keyframe animation. In terms of tone and faster pacing, the influence of my writing/direction also becomes clear. The third change, however, was the sound of Eddsworld, which proved to be more controversial than I expected.
I’ve talked at length about the casting of Tim Hautekiet as Edd but, much like our decision not to replicate Edd’s art style, I didn’t want to replicate his voice either. Edd Gould was gone and I didn’t feel it would’ve been respectful or healthy to obfuscate that fact. They say denial is the first stage of grief and I wasn’t about to do denial any favours by pretending Edd was still with us. Ultimately, Tim was cast because I felt his performance had an unpolished charm in keeping with Edd’s.
Sure, there was an expected amount of griping and groaning about the change, but that never got to me. I truly believed in my reasoning and have been able to stand by that decision to this day. The only “regret” I have was the unfortunate necessity to replace Edd’s original recording for the opening scene of part 1 to maintain continuity with part 2. Edd had given his all in that performance so it was a damn shame.
It wasn’t the sound design — provided by Dan Pugsley (and later also Elliot Gough) — that rubbed people the wrong way, nor was the change to Edd’s voice that proved to be especially controversial. What I found to be the most divisive change to the sound of Eddsworld was, in fact, the music.
From what I’d experienced, Edd wasn’t a particularly music-driven person; his iTunes library was full of unnamed tracks and vague titles like “mario.wav”, and historically this had been reflected in the show too. Edd would often pluck music from video games and pop culture where he saw fit, but for more niche or thematically fitting music, he’d often turn to his friends. When you hear ska music followed by power metal in Hello Hellhole, it’s safe to assume you’re hearing both mine and Tord Larsson’s immediate influence.
Back at the start of Eddsworld, using copyrighted music was a no-brainer; it was a passion project made for a predominantly unmonetised Internet. But in 2007, Viacom sued YouTube for enabling copyright infringement, and the entire landscape began to change; videos featuring unlicensed music would be automatically flagged and taken down. If Eddsworld wanted to survive, the jukebox soundtracks and needle drops had to go.
This is why, when it came to making Spares in 2008, I put together the soundscape and composed a bed of original backing music to accompany the episode (alongside Sam Houston and Chris Bingham, who provided original pieces for the fight sequence and end credits). From that point onwards, an effort was usually made to source, commission, or create original music for the show to avoid the claws of copyright strikes (and, eventually, demonetisation).
So, starting with Yoav ‘The Living Tombstone’ Landau for Space Face (Part 1) and Todd ‘LilDeuceDeuce’ Bryanton for Space Face (Part 2), the era of fully composed original scores had begun. I mentioned earlier that Eddsworld had operated with a jukebox-style soundtrack, meaning recognisable songs would take centre-stage and lead the scene (a la Guardians of the Galaxy), but now music would mainly slip into the background to simply accompany the scene, excluding the occasional montage or action sequence.
“Mickey Mousing” refers to music synchronised with the action or movements happening on screen. Violin notes are plucked as a character sneakily tiptoes, that kind of thing. This was the direction I gave Todd when it came to most of Legacy. Well, I believe my exact words were “more plinky plonks for this scene please”, but you get the idea.
A fully tailored, original score is what I’d been envisioning for Eddsworld ever since Spares and it was part of what Edd knew I’d be bringing to Space Face. I’ll never know how he would’ve felt about the finished product but it definitely added a level of polish that the show hadn’t yet seen. Suddenly, Eddsworld looked and felt like a show you might see on TV and for that, I was proud. However, that refinement directly clashed with the ruggish charm that many had come to love and expect from the show.
The criticism largely came in the nebulous form of “this doesn’t feel like Eddsworld anymore” and… I’m not an idiot, I won’t pretend not to understand what they were getting at. Overnight, for half a dozen reasons, the show no longer felt like something one enthusiastic animator had put together in his bedroom. But to that I say… Yeah, no shit. What choice did I have but to get the show exactly where we’d been taking it? Paul and I had moved closer to Edd specifically to help take Eddsworld to the next level and that’s exactly what we were going to do.
Back in 2004, the first few pieces of fan art I ever sent Edd had me copying his style as accurately as I could and do you know how he responded to that? He absolutely hated it. He wasn’t flattered by it, he wasn’t impressed; he simply told me to try harder to be original. He found the fact that I’d emulated even the imperfections in his art truly baffling. I was crushed at the time but it set the tone for our relationship and we spent the next decade supporting and pushing one another to keep improving.
For this reason, I believe the notion that Eddsworld needs to look and sound a certain way to truly be Eddsworld is — quite frankly — bullshit. Edd was always growing, always progressing, and that evolution was clear as day across his work from 2003 to 2011. To expect Eddsworld to remain stagnant, frozen in time just the way Edd left it, is to imply that how it looked and felt when he died is exactly how he wanted it — that that’s the best he could do — and I believe that to be a disservice and an insult to the ambitious artist Edd was.
Does that mean he would’ve liked Eddsworld: Legacy? No. Almost definitely not, in fact. My friend was quick to offer criticism and praise was hard-earned. But I know I tried to do exactly what he told me to back when we first met and what he’d been encouraging me to do ever since. To this day, I cannot think of a better way to honour my friend than by trying to make the best version of his show that I could.
Now, to put a fire out before it starts, I’d like to make it clear that these are my justifications for the look and feel of Legacy — informed by my opinions and my personal relationship with Edd — and do not reflect my feelings towards Eddsworld: Beyond. I am certain they could defend and justify their creative decisions just as passionately as I, and I respect that immensely. This is just my response to years and years of being told I made wrong and even shameful choices by people who never once cared to ask why those choices were made.
… Anyway! Paul hid an easter egg on one of the spaceship monitors in the form of a YouTube link that, unfortunately, had a typo and therefore didn’t work. Whoopsie!
February 7th, 2013 — The Snogre
As soon as I sat down to write a new Eddsworld script, I crumbled. The confidence I’d granted myself from having written Space Face was trumped by the overwhelming fear of failure. Until this point, I’d never truly written a script; something deep inside had just told me what the next words were, and I’d merely transcribed them. Suddenly, that voice fell silent, and the words weren’t coming.
The freeze was so bad that I took to Twitter, asking fans to suggest Christmas puns to work into the script. My lack of confidence is evident in the “scrooge you” exchange — a pun so tenuous that the episode grinds to a halt to acknowledge it. We also may have tweaked the script a bit after we blew past the Christmas release window.
One thing I was confident about, however, was that Legacy was going to make good on that throwaway line about “Red Leader” from WTFuture. Edd and I had long talked about making Super Average — a show I’d pitched him in 2008 about two slacker superheroes — and Red Leader was to be the main villain.
Red Leader was obviously a reference to a future Tord; a Tord who had somehow risen to a position of authority in a post-apocalyptic future and, given the character’s historical love of weapons and the military, it was safe to assume he wasn’t a benevolent leader. But how did he get there?
Eddsworld fans put Five Nights at Freddy’s fans to shame when it comes to picking up on clues and easter eggs. Edd and I knew this and were always keen to fill the scene with little goodies to reward and encourage their attentiveness. Naturally, it took all of five minutes for them to catalogue everything we slipped into Snogre and piece together the narrative I was hinting at.
The audience even got ahead of us, naming Tord’s otherwise unspecified militia ‘The Red Army’. Honestly, if we’d had any idea how attached people would get to these characters and — to be blunt — how incredibly horny they’d be, we would’ve stayed well away from using the likenesses of any real people. Shipping was something we’d come to expect from a corner of the Eddsworld audience but, by the time Legacy was over, that corner would spread from wall to wall, ceiling to floor.
While The Snogre might have been a Christmas episode that came out late, it ended by setting up Fun Dead, which would definitely come out in time for Halloween (and I definitely wasn’t having an even worse time trying to write).
June 14th, 2013 — Tom’s Tales of Crazy
While I struggled behind the scenes with Fun Dead, it had become clear that it was impossible for Paul and I alone to meet the upload schedule that we (and the audience) had expected.
Jesse Zhang was an incredibly funny and talented animator whom we’d recently been introduced to; their webtoon ‘Bumming Crew’ was, by nature of still being earnestly made for fun by a group of friends, more Eddsworld than Eddsworld. They were the perfect person to come on board.
Tom’s Tales of Awesome was the 2006 precursor to asdfmovie. I’d recorded random skits off the top of my head and sent them over to Edd for him to animate and compile together. I suppose that was technically the first episode I wrote by myself but… I’m fine with giving that title to Space Face.
After a second episode of Tom’s Tales in 2008, the series was retired so I could put that energy into asdf. However, with a gap in the upload schedule and a talented new toonsmith who simply got what we were going for, it was the perfect time to dust off the format.
The skits weren’t simply rejected asdf jokes but they were gags that would’ve been too long to compress into the quickfire series. It was honestly healing to shed the rigidity of making gags as quick and compact as possible and just have a little fun with a silly scenario. For a brief moment, I felt like that dumb teenager just trying to make my friend laugh again.
Also, remembering how irked I was when Edd drew Tom with an erection for Tom’s Tales of Brilliance (as a young Jehovah’s Witness, I always urged Edd to keep Eddsworld largely free of sex and swearing), I decided it was only fair to remain consistent and cut the slightly sexual scene where Tom makes love to a tree. I am nothing if not a man with integrity.
December 24th, 2013 — Hide and Seek
Each week, those of us who lived in London would meet up at the pub to eat, drink, and infodump about the projects we were working on. Around the time Snogre was wrapping up, I found myself chatting to Eddie ‘Eddache’ Bowley (who had only recently forgiven me for trash-talking him in a 2008 blog post) about struggling to write the next Eddsworld episode.
A few days later, Eddie would email me a script for a clock-tower-cleaning-themed Eddsworld short. I didn’t like it all that much — largely because I was still struggling to trust anyone but myself — but it showed a skill and enthusiasm that I was in desperate need of. I sent him my progress on the Fun Dead script to see if he could get it over the finish line.
With Eddie officially on the team and Paul churning away at Fun Dead, it was time to crack on with another short to fill the ever-increasing gap between full-length episodes. It would be the first episode Eddie and I would work on together; his presence would completely revitalise Legacy and release me from the creative freeze I’d been stuck in. Eddie joined the team in February of 2013 and by June we’d written and recorded Fun Dead, PowerEdd, and Saloonatics.
Now, one thing I’d intentionally implemented in Space Face but would go on to formalise with Eddie was a refinement of the show’s main characters. Obviously, the characters were originally based on the real-life versions of Edd, Matt, Tord, and myself — or at least what we thought the coolest, wackiest versions of ourselves would act like. Why I thought, at 14, that an angry drunk was my ultimate form, I’ll never know.
By nature of all the characters being based on edgy, silly, sarcastic, teenage boys, they all took turns acting like… Well… Edgy, silly, sarcastic, teenage boys. So, much as Edd’s animation had become more identifiable and better defined over the years, it seemed natural that it was time for the characters to do the same.
And with Edd gone, this wasn’t simply so that the characters would be less interchangeable than they had been in the past, but also to create a necessary emotional boundary so that writing his character wouldn’t be devastating for our mental health. If I’d viewed Edd as Edd Gould and not simply the punny leader of the group, I wouldn’t have been able to get through it.
Tom was angry, rude, and random. Matt was vain and stupid. Edd was a pun-loving artist who often led the others into wacky adventures. Now, those aren’t our definitions; they’re verbatim from the 2011 Eddsworld theme song that Edd wrote with Andrew Huang, and so that’s exactly what we leaned into. We toned down the more aloof traits the characters shared and honed in on what made them unique from one another. Call it characterisation, call it Flanderisation, I still believe it was creatively and emotionally necessary.
Hide and Seek was a fun, silly Matt-driven short about him getting isekai’d to a food-based world inside the fridge. Kati Knitt came on board as the animator and brought an incredibly charming, expressive, and cartoonish style to the episode. Ultimately, it was a thoroughly uncontroversial instalment, and we finally began to deliver on the promise I’d made a year and a half prior; Edd’s world was spinning once again.
One running gag in Hide and Seek had Edd and Tom becoming progressively less endeared by the deus ex machinas of Doctor Who — not-so-subtly spoofed as ‘Professor Why’ — inspired by my old friend Chris’ criticisms of the show. Some people took it as an affront to the real Edd who was a fan of Doctor Who but, as he was by no means above parodying his favourite shows/movies/games, we figured he’d give us a free pass.
Another running gag throughout the short came from Eddie and Matt as they assembled the temporary soundscape (which the short would be animated to before being fully recreated by sound designer Dan Pugsley). Much like in Tom’s Tales, I’d voiced every side character, and apparently they’d derived so much amusement from my “amazing!” that they made a running gag of a character (specifically a little mushroom) saying it over and over again. I love him.
Hide and Seek ended with a formal promise that Fun Dead would be released either the following January or February, at the absolute latest. People were getting antsy, especially given that we’d spent 2013 releasing 3 shorts in a row in place of a full episode, so it was time to deliver something substantial. Perhaps it was magical thinking that led me to believe a deadline would help the situation, but hey, we made it… Just.
February 28th, 2014 — Fun Dead
By simply being the first full episode in need of writing, Fun Dead immediately turned into a white whale of a script. I began penning it in 2012, but even with all my friends helping me brainstorm, I hit a huge writer’s block. In most cases, you’d be thrilled to have the voices in your head fall silent, but the Eddsworld characters going quiet on me was a worst-case scenario.
Once I gave Eddie the script and my notes, he came back with a full draft the very next day. To date, Eddie and I have very different approaches to writing: He prefers to get a “vomit draft” on paper and refine it from there, while I tackle scripts one heavily-scrutinised line at a time, which — much to Eddie’s dismay — is how we’d approach each episode going forward.
After a few writing sessions, we had a completed script, and Paul was finally able to animate beyond the opening scene. Of course, it would be at this point that Paul and I would discover our original goal of completing 2 minutes of animation per month was never going to happen, and so Tom’s Tales of Crazy and Hide and Seek would be born to fill the long wait.
I’ve already mentioned that the budget we’d penned was laughably inadequate, but it was during Fun Dead that the joke stopped being funny altogether. Paul and I had agreed that he’d be paid per completed minute and that his work would be less polished than he was capable of. However, he quickly found he simply wasn’t comfortable doing anything less than his best, so now he was set to be paid far less frequently for far better work. Even reallocating my salary to the animation budget didn’t get us close to balancing the books.
The setting for Fun Dead was to be “asdfland”, a callback to an old piece of art I’d made. Given that Edd had been integral to asdf since the beginning — making it a silly themesong back in 2006, including asdf references in Eddsworld as early as Ruined and Spares, and, of course, animating asdfmovie2 and voicing the “I like trains” kid — we didn’t expect this to be even remotely controversial but… When people have already decided that you’re exploiting your friend’s death for personal gain, they have a tendency to view every action you make through that lens, and so the accusations promptly rolled in — even from some of Edd’s peers. That was particularly tough.
The episode followed a very classic Eddsworld structure, which I call the “three doors” format (inspired by Hello Hellhole and the characters’ propensity to split up through separate doors). The basic structure goes like this: the gang are hanging out; something or someone inspires them to go somewhere fantastical; while there, they each have a funny moment based on the setting; maybe a montage of fun-and-games; a surprise villain to thwart; the end. Sprinkle in a few puns and non-sequiturs, and congratulations, you’ve made an “eddisode”!
In case it wasn’t obvious, the title is a play on “undead” (and, coincidentally, “funded”) but a lot of fans insisted that we’d missed the more obvious pun with “Dead’s World”. However, given that a lot of trolls had already made that joke after Edd’s death, I didn’t want to touch that pun with a 10-foot barge pole.
While not my personal favourite among the Legacy episodes, I do consider Fun Dead the best overall. From the classic episode structure to Paul’s impeccable visuals, the highly collaborative script to Todd and Yoav’s bouncy music. If I had the opportunity to posthumously show Edd just one episode of Legacy, it’d be that one.
December 31st, 2014 — PowerEdd
As I mentioned earlier, while Paul was working on Fun Dead, Eddie and I had written most of the remaining episodes of Legacy. So, when it came to finding an animator for our superhero hijinks, we couldn’t think of a better animator than the exceptionally skilled Anthony ‘Kreid’ Price.
Edd had used the moniker ‘SuperEdd’ a few times before, so naturally we opted to call the episode PowerEdd instead. Look, at least PowerEdd is an actual pun (as in “superpowered”) and therefore more Eddsworld-y by default. Also, because Edd had drawn himself as a superhero already, we were able to include a few pieces of his art across the episode.
We took PowerEdd as an opportunity to add a little more depth to the characters and their relationships, giving Edd and Eduardo a slightly more complicated history and letting their dynamic drive the story forward. I was worried that having a character express and act upon a sincere emotion (in this case, guilt) would be wildly out-of-place for Eddsworld but people really liked it. Knowing that the audience were receptive to a wider range of emotions and dynamics would definitely inform how we’d approach The End.
Every superhero needs a rival, so this was the perfect opportunity to bring back the neighbours that Tom Bown and Edd had cooked up back in 2010. Chris ‘Oney’ O’Neill politely declined to return as the voice of Eduardo and requested that we recast, citing that he’d initially only taken the role as a favour to Edd and that this felt too different. I asked impressionist and professional voice actor Brock Baker to take up the role and was thrilled with the rich performance he gave.
One background detail that was immediately noticed but rarely acknowledged was the bizzaro-neighbour version of Tord. You can see a slither of his arm on the sofa next to Mark but I like to imagine that he was there in every scene featuring the neighbours, just slightly out of frame. His name was Todd and was definitely the nicest member of the group, a real Ned Flanders type.
Perhaps the biggest self indulgence I allowed myself with this episode was the inclusion of Monster Tom. Tom’s black eyes were initially the result of me drawing a monobrow (a la Gary Larson) onto a drawing I’d done of myself in Edd’s style. If you’ll recall, Edd didn’t like people copying his style so my genius solution was to also steal something from someone else. Perhaps originality is just stealing from so many different things that people can no longer identify a single source.
The monobrow would evolve into hollow circles (specifically whenever Tom was scared or shocked) and eventually into fully black eyes. Edd preferred to imagine that Tom had hollow eye sockets like a bowling ball but I held firm that his eyes were there and they were black. Why were they black, you ask? Well, because Tom was possessed by a rage demon, of course! … Yeah, Edd also found it cringe but I was 16, full of teen angst, and very headstrong.
To not draw too much attention to it — given that it was a little cringe — we let the transformation sequence be open to interpretation. Maybe Tom had just landed at the feet of some random monster who roughs him up off screen? Who knows? Not us! Eddie and I never actually settled on whether Tom turned into the monster or if the monster came out of him, which is why you maybe see its spirit flying back to Tom’s body after Eduardo blasts it.
Monster Tom would pop up less than a year later in a crossover with mine and Eddie’s own show Crash Zoom. Given that Edd never vibed with the whole possession thing, I figured it best to keep it separate from Eddsworld for the most part and planned to fully explore the concept of soul demons in our own thing once Legacy was over. For reasons we’ll get into later, that would sadly never come to fruition.
August 28th, 2015 — Mirror Mirror
Back in 2013, a fan drew genderswapped versions of the characters, inspiring Paul to illustrate his own. Seeing Paul’s art, Matt suggested that we make an episode based on those characters. Eddie was initially very opposed to making a genderswap episode, fearing that any story with the hook of “Eddsworld but they’re girls now” would inevitably wind up being about them being girls. Perhaps an overdone battle of the sexes, “here’s how boys and girls are different” type of story or — even worse — an episode where they all get the hots for each other, go on dates, and end up tickling each other’s feet (imagine how weird that would be).
Now, as a shame-filled religious teen, I’d always fought to keep sex out of Eddsworld (I’m still mad at Edd for drawing Tom with an erection in Tom’s Tales of Brilliance). In the episode MovieMakers, Edd wanted the boys to get horny for Laurel and fight over her simply because she was a girl and I fought him tooth and nail to keep that from happening; suggesting instead that one of our shoes falls in love with one of her shoes.
Naturally, I shared Eddie’s reservations over making something crude or overdone. Once I cited Adventure Time’s Fionna and Cake as an example of a genderswap that didn’t rely on hacky or sexist tropes by simply having the characters be from a mirrored alternate universe, Eddie was on board. After Eddie, Matt, and I brainstormed a few gags and storybeats on a long train ride, Eddie and I fleshed out a full script and ‘Mirror Mirror’ was born.
Sandra Rivas joined us as the animator for this episode and her work was absolutely impeccable. The toon came together over the course of a year due to some unforeseeable delays but it was well worth the wait and the results speak for themselves.
All our voice actors did a great job of matching the delivery styles of their male counterparts and, now that everyone had a couple years to grieve, it no longer felt inappropriate to ask a member of Edd’s family to be involved. Chloe Dungate, Alice Ann Stacey, and Edd’s sister Vicky Gould voiced the female alternates, with this being Chloe’s second time playing a genderswapped version of me that same year.
The genie Dazeem is not — as the Eddsworld Wiki claims — named after the character Gazeem from Aladdin but the “Adele Dazeem” Oscars incident that had happened the same month we wrote the short. Hey, it made us laugh, and we felt that Tim voicing the character was a nice nod to when Edd used to voice side characters.
October 23th, 2015 — Trick or Threat
With the remaining Legacy episodes busy being animated, we once again found ourselves with very little to show the public, and so it was time to spin up another short to feed the hungry masses. We’d been seeing a lot of Brandon Turner’s work online and so lassoed him in for a quick short.
We’d originally planned on working with Todd Bryanton to make the finale of Legacy a musical but, due to reasons I’ll explain later, that idea had been abandoned. Still, the desire to tell a story through song had stuck around and, knowing how quickly both Todd and Brandon worked, we hoped things might go smoothly for once.
Now, this is the part where you’d expect me to tell you how everything went horribly wrong, but no; Trick or Threat would take just 1 month to go from idea to upload. We had a great, reliable crew behind us and were finally starting to get the hang of things. For once, it all went incredibly smoothly.
Trick or Threat was also our second crossover with Crash Zoom, featuring Kate as a mischievous soul reaper. We figured this wasn’t overly self-indulgent as knowledge of Crash Zoom wasn’t necessary to follow the story and it would’ve just been some stock supernatural villain otherwise. The real self-indulgence would be me making one final reference to the whole possession thing.
December 18th, 2015 — Christmas Eddventure
People loved Trick or Threat and — at least at the time of writing this — it still sits as the 4th most popular Eddsworld video of all time. So, naturally, we got greedy and tried to make lightning strike twice.
We assembled the same crew as before and put together Christmas Eddventure, a quick, silly short about all the Christmas specials we’d never see the gang go on. While it had some fun throwbacks such as Joshua Tomar returning to voice Santa and Zanta, people were nowhere near as enamoured with it as they were Trick or Threat and — at least at the time of writing this — it sits as the 37th most popular Eddsworld video.
Due to a tight personal schedule, the earliest Tim was available to record his lines — his final session for Legacy overall — would end up being the same day we’d upload the episode. We all really wanted to go on our Christmas break.
With every other Legacy script written and recorded back in 2014, Christmas Eddventure made for a somewhat underwhelming final creative contribution to Eddsworld. Still, it was nice to spend one last Christmas with the boys, especially given that the very first episode was a Christmas special too.
February 12th, 2016 — Saloonatics
Edd had always wanted to make a wild west themed episode, filling a page in his sketchbook about it and writing the beginnings of a script back in 2011 (which I believe would be the last script he’d actually write). With the ‘Fistfull of Stupid’ script being completely forgotten about until just last year, Eddie and I relied only on Edd’s few notes to extrapolate a full episode and opted to use one of his alternate titles: Saloonatics.
The story focussed on descendants of the Eddsworld gang (including a bartender who’d emigrate to Norway at the end of the episode) which gave us an opportunity to do something a little different with our performances; a posh Matt, an American Tom, and even a Mexican Mark!
Following PowerEdd, the plan was for Anthony ‘Kried’ Price to animate Saloonatics, but upon completing the storyboard, he had to drop out to focus on another project. So, we turned back to Tom’s Tales of Crazy animator Jesse Zhang (and their newly founded animation team ‘Studio Cacti’) to bring Kried’s boards to life.
Jesse brought a radically different visual style to Saloonatics, keen to create unique silhouettes for every character, and we absolutely loved it. It added such a charm that elevated the episode well beyond our initial vision. The animation and character designs would prove to be divisive within the audience but — out of all the criticisms we received for Legacy — this was one decision I’ve never second-guessed.
Speaking with Paul recently (partially to confirm I wasn’t misremembering anything for this post), he reaffirmed how much Edd loved seeing his characters realised in styles wildly different to his own (and disliked it when even Paul would mimic his style). I question a lot of things but I know he would’ve adored Jesse and Cacti’s take on the characters.
The animation itself wasn’t merely a stylistic choice, however. With Studio Cacti coming on board relatively late into production and a hard deadline for The End rapidly approaching, the decision was made to focus on stepped, keyframe-driven animation (a la Into the Spiderverse) to give Jesse and their team the best chance at getting it done in time and with the budget available (which, at this point, was coming straight from TurboPunch).
Given that the characters’ lack canonical last names, we gave Edd’s ancestor the last name ‘Gold’, Tom’s ancestor the name ‘Thompson’, and Matt’s we didn’t include because it was a reference to a fanmail we’d once received that misspelt his name and he didn’t find it funny at all.
Also, fun fact, Edd does drugs in this episode! While audiences can rightly interpret Edd’s time-slowing, efficiency-boosting experience drinking cola for the first time as a sugar rush, it is in fact a nod to the original 1886 recipe for Coca-Cola: literal cocaine. I don’t think cocaine actually does that, however, but I’m not about to check.
In case it isn’t obvious, Saloonatics is my favourite episode of Legacy and the one I’m most proud of. Not just because I like the way it looks but also because I think it’s mine and Eddie’s best work as storytellers; weaving together two converging storylines with endearing characters and fun, theme-fitting gags.
March 2nd 2016 — Eddsworld Extra
With a huge team of artists working smoothly on the remaining episode, the TurboPunch team found ourselves with some time on our hands. Given that Eddsworld: Legacy had largely been focused on creation, it felt like a good time to put some hours into preservation.
Over the last few weeks of Legacy, we embarked on a massive effort to preserve and polish as much of Edd’s work as possible. We started by remastering and uploading 8 of Edd’s missing shorts/episodes to a side channel, replacing copyrighted music with original compositions by Marc Lovallo, who had perfectly captured the tone of the original soundtracks.
Then, while Elliot gave every YouTube thumbnail a facelift, I rewrote every video description to include the full credits and links to every contributor to the show (largely to ensure I wouldn’t miss anyone in the full credits for The End). Edd had left some descriptions as barren as “made by me”, so I had my work cut out for me, but I made sure to always preserve Edd’s original descriptions at the very end.
March 9th, 2016 — The End (Part 1)
It was time to wrap up Legacy and Eddsworld as a whole, but how do you give a satisfying finale to a show with no character development or narrative throughline? Well, you bring out the red one, of course!
Eddsworld had been a show about a few friends simply hanging out and doing wacky stuff, yet somehow it had developed a fiercely passionate and creative fanbase. We wanted to reward that investment and enthusiasm with a payoff worthy of their dedication. Given that there was only one mystery, one character that the audience had been begging to see more of since 2008, Eddie and I agreed that Tord had to come back for our final episode.
Over the years, we had done our best to track down and reach out to the real-life Tord on whom the character was initially based, but to no avail. Matt and I couldn’t even find a way to contact him in the days following Edd’s death, meaning he sadly found out the same way as the audience. Tord was a ghost and so the decision was made to bring his character back without him or his consent.
I won’t defend my decision and I accept the animosity it earned me. I prioritised telling the best story I could over the wishes of a stranger I hadn’t heard from in close to a decade. Some people believe I made that call because of a genuine, deep-seated resentment that I held towards the man, but that “rivalry” was never more than theatre from a couple of teenagers bantering with each other.
The truth is, I didn’t know Tord and I simply didn’t care anymore. To stay somewhat sane while working on Eddsworld, I’d divorced the characters from the real people they had once been, and I didn’t stop myself from doing that to Tord either. I justified it by telling myself Edd had already laid the groundwork for separating Tord from his character with Red Leader. On a personal level, it was wrong, and if I do ever meet the man, I will give him a sincere apology that I don’t expect him to accept.
People also assumed that Tord was written as a villain due to a perceived personal grievance, but we just based him on what little characterisation existed before the character first departed. Tord had a love of guns, violence, and military leadership; he would often choose chaos and destruction; he was prepared to go to literal war with his friends over a girl or a slice of bacon; he and Tom had a well-documented rivalry; and he loved hentai too (look, we were teenagers). Red Leader was already canon, the seeds had been sewn, and it was time to end this show with a bang.
When it came to the story itself, Eddie and I knew we wanted to do two things: bring back Tord and explore the theme of closure. The first half would do the former and the second half, the latter. Part 1 was set to end with Tord destroying the house and leaving the gang homeless, while Part 2 would be entirely about the gang collectively trying to find a new place to live; making peace with a great loss and finding a new, imperfect way to move forward. It was also going to be a musical!
However, back in mid 2014, Tim unexpectedly announced that he would be moving to California and we suddenly had a hard, rapidly approaching deadline to record any remaining dialogue of him as Edd. We scrapped the musical element (possibly for the best) and restructured the story to finish the script before his move, extending Tord’s presence to both parts and turning the househunt into a B-plot. This, of course, would prove to cause its own set of problems down the line.
Regardless of the change, the plan was always for both parts to be a celebration of Eddsworld overall, full of cameos and call-backs. The photo montage, the flashback (animated by Marc Lovallo and Billy Crinion), the shelf of souvenirs from every previous episode were just a few of the homages we added to Part 1. This was to be our final goodbye to the world Edd had built and we wanted to remind people just how special it was.
Now, people criticised Jamie Spicer-Lewis’ thick slavic accent for not sounding enough like Tord’s original nordic one but did they ever consider that maybe we’d done that intentionally to separate the character from the real man? I mean, we hadn’t, but it’s fun to pretend.
March 15th, 2016 — The Eddsworld Legacy Documentary
As previously mentioned, it took an embarrassingly long time to fulfill all of the promises made in the Eddsworld: Legacy fundraiser, the last of which being a behind-the-scenes mini documentary about how the show was made. This was only supposed to be a 10-minute insight into the work we were putting into Legacy but, given how long it’d been delayed, it only seemed right to make it worth the wait.
Back at the start of Legacy, I’d brought a friend on to shoot and edit the aforementioned 10-minute mini doc but the first draft was — to be blunt — unsalvageable. The video was a write-off and, like a lot of the fundraiser perks at that time, went on ice for the foreseeable future. But with Legacy finally wrapping up, I tasked TurboPunch’s editor and videographer Elliot Gough with making an all-new, all-encompassing documentary that wouldn’t just cover our work but the story of Eddsworld altogether.
I didn’t want (and honestly lacked the emotional bandwidth) to influence the documentary so Elliot was granted complete control to tell the story as he saw fit. He interviewed the crew and Edd’s family, put together the edit and a script, brought on Matt Ley to voice the narrator, and David ‘Hoolopee’ Post to animate said narrator. Ultimately, Elliot did a great job of telling our story. I just hope I’m not contradicting anything I said in that documentary here…
March 16th, 2016 — The End (Part 2)
In a Vokle stream way back in 2011, Edd was asked how he’d like a final episode of Eddsworld to be handled, should it ever become necessary. Paul, having rewatched every one of Edd’s streams in the wake of his death, promptly dug up his answer. Edd said he’d want to “call in every favour” and get multiple animators working together to make one big finale. So that’s exactly what we did.
We made the animation for this episode the most Edd-like of Legacy. We didn’t aim to replicate his style completely but settled on a fusion, overseen directly by Paul who had storyboarded both parts and was animating the first, while a team of 10 others followed his lead on Part 2. We also reached out to every artist, musician, and many of the voice actors from the show’s 13-year history (including Alex L’Abbé, the original voice actor for Tom and Tord before we owned microphones).
As Edd suggested, we called in every favour from damn near everyone we could think of and the result is a labour of love with over 40 people coming back one last time, for Edd, to send off his show and celebrate the 10th anniversary of his YouTube channel.
The End (Part 2) is about death. Well, it was supposed to be. As mentioned earlier, we planned to start the episode with the house destroyed and the gang looking for a new place to live. The episode — and especially the destruction of the house — was to be a metaphor for the sudden loss of Edd and our collective efforts to find a way forward, to give these characters a new life after what bound them all together was gone.
In a blog post I wrote a little while after Legacy, I fumbled my explanation for this metaphor and caused myself a world of strife. I wrote that because the destruction of the house was a metaphor for the death of Edd, then logically, Tord’s return and eventual act of destruction was a metaphor for Edd’s cancer. This wasn’t true. It’s not how we’d written the episode and the idea of Tord being a metaphor for anything was a deeply irresponsible and inconsiderate thing for me to say. People were justifiably outraged and, despite retracting it almost immediately, the notion that I wittingly turned one of Edd’s friends into an allegory for what killed him persists to this day.
People complained that The End (Part 2) was overly Tom-heavy, and it was. As mentioned earlier, the househunt was intended to be a group effort but had been condensed into a Tom-led B-plot due to a tight deadline. Ultimately, the episode wound up being focused on Tom and Tord out of necessity, but those who refuse to separate the characters from their voice actors took this to mean I was making Eddsworld about myself.
Originally, Part 2 would have begun at Jon’s funeral, followed by the gang searching for a new home, before having all the past villains from the show team up to try and stop them (but with singing). There was also a subplot wherein Matt became progressively more feral and brain-dead, eventually revealing that he was the leftover Matt clone from Spares who had been mentally declining for years. The episode would’ve ended with the original Matt returning home after a years-long holiday, surprised that no one had noticed that the idiotic clone wasn’t him.
The episode ended with the gang moving into separate but adjacent apartments, symbolising that, while things had changed, they would always remain close. Much like Edd Gould himself, the house was gone and wasn’t coming back, but that didn’t mean everything was lost. It was our final message of hope in the face of grief.
With 6 episodes, 7 shorts, and £80,000 raised for charity, Eddsworld: Legacy was over.
The Aftermath
The first year of Eddsworld: Legacy had been the hardest and most dysfunctional but, with the arrival of Eddie, things had steadily improved; by the last year or so things were running smoothly. However, the catharsis I’d hoped would come with finally completing my promise never manifested. Instead, my already shaky mental health took a further nosedive.
Back at that dining table 4 years earlier I had made a promise: that I would keep Edd’s show going a little longer, both for charity and out of love for him and the world he’d built, and then I would see it put to rest. Eddsworld: Legacy was a love letter to a friend I felt I had failed to cherish enough in life. It was a eulogy. It was an apology. It was my only way to make order out of chaos. It was everything I had.
A few weeks before we released The End, I just so happened to bump into Edd’s mother on the tube. Standing amidst the hustle and bustle of Bank station, I proudly told her that we were putting the finishing touches on the final episodes, and then it would be over. She replied, “Oh, Eddsworld isn’t ending. Matt’s taking over. Didn’t you know that?”
No. No, I did not.
We called an emergency meeting and I begged them to reconsider. When I say begged, I mean I got down on my knees and begged. Me, Paul, Eddie, and the rest of the team had given our all to what we believed was a send-off to a show and, more importantly, a friend that we held so dear. Unable to separate Edd from Eddsworld, the show was a wound that I had picked at for years; refusing to let it heal until I had kept my promise, and what I was hearing was that that wound would now remain open indefinitely. It was more than I could take.
The logical, rational, healthy thing to do would’ve been to compartmentalise. I needed to accept that the show was going on without me and that that fact had no impact on my grief or my relationship with Edd. But there was nothing logical, rational, or healthy about the last 4 years of my life; just a raw nerve getting plucked at over and over. I was incredibly mentally ill.
Eddie and I emphatically, desperately pitched what we envisioned for Eddsworld after Legacy, which we called Eddsworld: Forever. We wanted our final act to be releasing Eddsworld under a Creative Commons license. Aside from corporations mass-producing bootleg merchandise or making their own version of the show, anyone would be allowed to make anything they wanted. Forever.
My request was denied, Forever was scrapped, and I was instructed to include an announcement in the credits of our “finale” to let people know that the show wasn’t, in fact, over. I chose my words carefully, not comfortable making any more promises, and said only that I was handing control over to Edd’s family.
In the years that followed, I would routinely spiral into bouts of furious rumination. A look of exacerbated reservation would descend upon Eddie’s face as he knew my latest repetitive rant would consume the rest of our workday. I was so angry and hurt over what I felt had been done but even more so over what I knew was coming. And then it arrived.
In 2020, Eddsworld: Beyond officially began and both social media and the comments section of my old friend’s channel lit up with a chorus of gleeful cruelty, celebrating what many said was “what Edd actually wanted” and deriding the ruinous “cancer” that was Legacy and — more specifically — me. Like a fool, I read it all, until I finally hit rock bottom.
After reading and re-reading a sentence so cruel, so perfectly crafted to tear me down to an atomic level, I finally snapped out of my self-pity and took responsibility for my resentment. After a couple years of healing, work, and therapy, I’d meet up with Matt and Chris and finally put it to rest.
I didn’t need the show to be over; I just needed to accept that the control I’d fought so recklessly for was never real. I thought that if I could take the chaos of a man’s unceremonious death and give it meaning and purpose, if I could put a neat little bow on my friend’s legacy and call it complete, that I would find peace; that it would make sense. But it was merely a lie that I had told myself to feel a sense of control at my most powerless.
Edd was gone. Eddsworld was just a cartoon. I had done my best. It was time to move on.
10 years later
Looking back, 10 years on, I have a lot of sympathy for my younger self. It was an insane, incredibly public situation to have found myself in as a grieving 21-year-old. Eddsworld: Legacy is simultaneously one of my biggest achievements and my worst regrets. I made a lot of mistakes and bad decisions, but by the end, I also made myself proud; I’ll never know what Edd would’ve thought of Legacy, so that’ll simply have to do.
To this day, I’m so grateful to have had Eddie, Paul, and the rest of my team by my side. I fell apart so very quickly at the start of Legacy, and it took a village to get it (and me) over the finish line. I wouldn’t have been able to do it without them. If any of my team are reading this: thank you, you all did great.
To Matt, I hope you’re doing alright. When I begged you not to continue the show all those years ago, it wasn’t simply because I wanted it to end, but because I knew more than anyone the pain you were risking by taking those reins. I truly hope you put better safeguards in place than I.
The truth is — even now — I’d still return to Eddsworld, but only to give it one last episode. Not a grand finale, not a convoluted, self-serving metaphor, just one last classic eddventure with those silly boys that I so dearly miss. I’d stroke that doorframe, turn off the lights, and say “so long” to my old friend one last time.
