Welcome to Eltingville: Ward Willoughby

This was the end result of some back-and-forth between myself and the artist at the Cartoon Network that was doing the clean up drawings over my designs. You can see my anxiety all over the noes. Anytime a design went through several revisions I felt like I was annoying someone, but no one ever sent me anything for me to feel nervous about. I was very nervous during the production of the pilot. 

Like Ironjaw and Jane Dickey, Ward Willoughby was added to the cast to allow me to work outside the four Eltingville Club members. Ward would have been a yapping dog-type character trying to get in with the older Club members, while being used, manipulated and experimented on by Jane Dickey. 

He is a pure fan as opposed to the Club members, honestly in love with the hobby and the comics and genre collectibles he faithfully collects. He doesn't see the bad in the Club, he just honestly sees the good in everything, to a ridiculous degree, believing in good vs evil and the notion of heroism and cooperation pushed in comics and fantasy RPG videogames. He is guileless, open and a pain in the ass because he can't stop trying to impress people and get them to like him. Everyone mistreats him, but even negative attention makes Ward feel like he's part of things. This is why he allows Jane to subject him to chemical and electrical experiments, sympathetic magic trials and wild mushroom tastings. 

Ward was a fun character to write, and I had plans for how he, Jane, Ironjaw and Sekowsky (the kid with the eyepatch whose accent is fluid). After the pilot was over and done with I sent an e-mail to my producer at the Cartoon Network about working with them on it, and I said one of the things I was sorry about was that we wouldn't get to explore any of the new characters. I felt that if we went to a series, people would see we were going to do more than just throw trivia and references into the air and have the Club fight among themselves. I got a reply from him that he felt we could do something with those characters, that I should remember that I could pitch ideas to the Network through him and that he was going to talk to Mike Lazzo about things. 

That is how I got a pilot deal for a series that centered around Ward Willoughby. 

The series was initially called "Mental Ward". It would have featured Ward, Jane, Ironjaw and Sekowsky, the characters that were created for the pilot and which were owned by the Network. There was also well a monster character named Tyrone that jane and the others freed from an eons-long imprisonment in the earth (buried deep in the wilds of New Jersey). I wrote a series pitch with character drawings and whatnot. After some back and forth we reworked the series to focus on Tyrone, because, as producer Keith Crofford pointed out, Ward was too passive a character and Tyrone seemed like a better lead. Which was correct. With Tyrone as the "star" the full bible and series pitch bloomed more naturally than it would have with the poor, clueless victim of everyone's schemes. 

I wrote a series bible with Sarah for "Tyrone's Inferno" re-using elements from the Mental Ward material. Then I wrote a script, which Sarah edited. Sarah would have been a producer and script editor on the series, I would have been a writer and producer. In the end, as I've written about earlier here, I self-destructed and torpedoed the project. I was afraid of the possibility of success, responsibility and making decisions. I froze up and avoided fixing a minor element of the bible. The project was shelved after I stalled out for months. A disaster, and another clue that I needed to be back in therapy and dealing with my issues. I didn't completely ruin our relationship with the Network and the Adult Swim -- they recommended us as script doctors for the proposed Shin-Chan project (which I also screwed up, by dragging my feet on the last two scripts. I hated the show and was deep in a self-destructive writing/working block) -- but things weren't the same and we weren't pursued for new projects as before. I was going through a lot of things at the time, some of which I'm still dealing with, unfortunately. Anyway, in the end the saddest thing about Ward was my handling of everything that he helped to make happen.

Trivia notes: 

"Ward Willoughby" was the name of the character played by the great supporting actor Jack Carson in the movie, Love Crazy (1941. In the movie, Ward Willoughby constantly introduces himself by saying, loudly, "My name's Willoughby, Ward Willoughby --" and it always stuck in my head. I don't usually name characters after other characters, but it just felt like a perfect name for the hapless little idiot.