Inside The Insanity Of ‘Gumball’s’ Holiday Special, ‘The Cheapmas’

If you dive into the six seasons of Cartoon Network’s The Amazing World of Gumball and the current two seasons of its Hulu revival, The Wonderfully Weird World of Gumball, brothers Gumball and Darwin Watterson have only officially celebrated Christmas in two episodes: “Christmas” and “The Cheapmas,” which is part of the new batch that debuts December 22 on Hulu.

There’s a 13-year spread between the two episodes, and that’s just how long it took for Gumball creator Ben Bocquelet and new series executive producer Erik Fountain to come up with their kind of take on the holiday again.

“I think we wanted to do a really wonky Christmas episode, like a terrible one. And I think Matt [Layzell] and Erik succeeded,” Bocquelet explains, complimenting his co-showrunners.

“The Cheapmas” finds the Watterson brothers super excited about the impending holiday, but their cheer is systematically ruined by their dad, the crazed shoppers at the local mall, and the high cost of everything. So they decide to buy cheap knockoff gifts from a van sold by Shady Man and force them into their neighbors’ homes. As expected, they eventually find themselves trying to escape the cops in a van chase driven by a haunted doll.

Bocquelet says the crazy premise came out of them wanting to poke fun at their characters and the holidays together. “I think it was just this idea that sometimes we just can’t deal with things anymore, and we just wanted to have fun with a topic that usually is approached with a lot of deference. Like, you want it to be magical and all that, and we wanted to do the exact opposite.”

Fountain agrees, adding, “Personally, I like Gumball and Darwin are starting so high and so ready for the holidays, so excited, and then getting swatted down seeing how corporate it is. But they get a glimmer of hope by the end.”

Gumball is now famous for mixing up its animation styles and techniques, blending 2D and 3D animation with layers of real-world media. Fountain says that in this episode, during the car chase through the town of Elmore, audiences not only get a cameo from Adventure Time’s Jake the Dog but also see much more of the town.

“The hardest thing was the backgrounds because they’re driving through town and they’re seeing things that we haven’t seen before, and it’s this winter wonderland thing,” Fountain details. “The heaviest lift really wasn’t character or design. It was building the environment around them, and some of them are 3D sets.”

In order to achieve that ambition within their normal pipeline, Fountain says they utilized a mix of preexisting backgrounds along with new ones, such as the burning mall. “You have your scales that you have to keep balanced so you can make a whole new downtown area because we’re going around and seeing Hector’s house, or that cave that we’ve seen before, or we’re seeing Tobias’s house. You counterbalance development of new assets with reuse of existing assets,” he explains.

Then there are new characters, like the haunted doll, who, Fountain says, was born out of a network legal note. “They’re like, ‘We can’t have Darwin and Gumball steal a van. They’re children. They can’t drive.’ So sometimes necessity is the mother of invention, and we introduced the creepy, haunted doll character because she’s hundreds of years old, so she becomes their chauffeur,” he laughs.

Along with “The Cheapmas,” Bocquelet says fans should also enjoy the second season finale, “The Void,” which finally addresses the events of the season six cliffhanger, “The Inquisition.”

“It just feels good that we got to do this,” he says of that resolution. “So this one’s got a special place in my heart, and I suppose that’s good.”