Many of Cartoon Network's most successful series are a part of the mature content programming block Adult Swim. Shows such as Rick and Morty, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and Robot Chicken have premiered on the channel and found profound success on the station.
One of the newer shows that sits in the current programming block is The Shivering Truth. The series is nestled in nicely between Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon's Rick and Morty and JJ Villard's Fairy Tales during its quarter-hour midnight time slot each Sunday.
The Shivering Truth is currently in its second season, and it hails from Vernon Chatman, who has served as the producer of South Park since 2001. We recently spoke with Chatman in support of the current season and we got to pick his brain about seveal curious topics, learning quite a bit about his inspiration amongst other things. Check it out!
Joe: Where did you initially get the idea to create The Shivering Truth?
Vernon Chatman: I always get all of these ideas and collect them. They have come to me in this form for a long time and I kind of figured out a good outlet to tell a whole bunch of stories in a whole bunch of different ways at a crazy speed in a format that I realized I loved the more I worked with it. I love the stop-motion format.
Joe: What was your inspiration for creating this series?
Vernon Chatman: Really it was just an outlet for some of my favorite ideas and ways of storytelling. I love short movies and stories where you don’t know if it’s going to last ten seconds or ten minutes. And logic that doesn’t seem to make sense but it does and nonsense that seems to make sense.
And my other big inspiration was stop-motion itself. The actual practical objects that are moving through space is this magic trick that CG doesn’t have. It engages your brain in a way that CG doesn’t because you’re seeing all this labor and craft and care unspooling over the course of time frame by frame and not consciously registering how its happening but some part of you knows the actual handiwork going into every single thing. That sort of unconscious awareness of the tangible is endlessly inspiring as a format.
Joe: Will the new season be exactly the same as the last or is it going to veer off in another direction?
Vernon Chatman: The show is all about veering off in another direction. It starts with a veer and continues on a tangent and then diverts off. It’s all about associating off in different directions, so it continues to splinter off into further depths of nonsense and perfectly illogical absurdity but probably a little more aggressively and a little more care crafted beauty because we’re figuring out how to do everything, and maybe even with kind of a wider dynamic range of emotion.
Joe: Would you like me to share anything else with your fans?
Vernon Chatman: Watch the show and tell people about it. Enjoy it, good luck, and wear a seatbelt while you’re watching.
What do you guys think of these coments from creator Vernon Chatman? Check out the trailer and synopsis for The Shivering Truth and share your thoughts in the comments section!
The Shivering Truth is a delicately crafted, darkly surreal anthology comedy.
Each episode is a miniature propulsive omnibus cluster bomb of painfully riotous daymares all dripping with the orange goo of dream logic. A series of loosely linked emotional parables about stories within tales that crawled out of the deepest caverns of your unconscious mind and became lovingly animated in breath-slapping stop motion -- in other words, it is the TRUTH (squared).
New episodes of The Shivering Truth air on Adult Swim every Sunday night at midnight.