Please enjoy the fourth in a new five-part series from guest author Henrik M. – Ed
It feels almost quaint to look back at the past 20 years and see just how drastically and quickly the entertainment landscape changed. In 2000, everything had its own little niche. Sure, video games and the Internet were already there, and showing signs of their future dominance of our lives, but there was no Netflix, no YouTube, and television was still the great, unquestionable overlord of media. Unfortunately, it was during these early days of the 21st century that the inherent flaws of network TV cost us five classic animated shows. In this five-part series, I’ll be taking a look at several short-lived gems of animation lost to us for a variety of factors, the biggest of which being that ratings-based television was a dying dinosaur 20 years ago, and hasn’t gotten any livelier in the interim.
So far in our five-part series, it seems like even the creators of forgotten animation just want to forget their shows ever existed. Most of them simply moved on to bigger things and left their past completely behind, like a failed childhood dream, or a teaching job you had to leave because your degree came from a college that didn’t technically exist. Maybe it’s too painful to keep being reminded of your youthful naivete, or it’s too difficult to deal with the gauntlet of misery that is television copyright law, but for whatever reason, most creators simply walk away and never look back. But that’s not always the case. In this entry, we’ll be talking about a man who fought for his work, and still fights even to this very day. This is the story of Undergrads.
Normally, this is where I’d talk about the creator’s past, and the comically long list of hits they’d carve out for themselves once the creative folly of youth had tanked, but I won’t do that this time…because there aren’t any. Unless you’re already a fan of Undergrads, you won’t know the name Pete Williams, because he hasn’t actually done anything else. Well, unless you happen to be the world’s biggest fan of the low budget horror short Anamnesis. Williams is one of those rare tragic cases of unfulfilled potential that doesn’t end with “drug overdose in Heath Ledger’s apartment.” He’s simply spent the better part of the past 17 years trying to resurrect his creation. Our story begins when, after dropping out of college at age 19, Williams got the idea for an animated series starring four freshman college buddies, and Undergrads was born.
Debuting on MTV in April 2001, Undergrads follows the life and times of four lifelong friends through their first year at college, though unlike most shows and movies with this premise, the characters aren’t all roommates. Hell, they don’t even go to the same school, for the most part, which is part of the show’s humor, and allowed it to draw comedy from the dynamic of different kinds of schools. The majority of the plot is set at State U, which most of us will find familiar–the kind of generic diploma factories many of us attended in order to go to college for the sake of going to college, rather than to actually learn anything useful, so we could graduate with a degree in Communication or some other nonsense that qualified us for a lifetime of working at Starbucks. The secondary location was Techerson Tech, which is the other side of the college coin–the kind of school where the technology elite of tomorrow found sanctuary after the inferno of high school, further honing their skills for the day they would become our digital rulers (also known as the supervillain origin of Elon Musk). Comically, and fittingly, there was a third school that never actually appears on screen because the character attending it spends all his time at a frat house or harassing his friends, the Central State Junior Community College. In his defense, he could be using a crude cardboard cutout of himself for attendance, and he’d still probably pass his classes, because it’s a community college, for God’s sake.
The show focused on the self-proclaimed Clique: Parker “Nitz” Walsh, Rocko, Calvin “Cal” Evans and Justin “Gimpy” Taylor (yes, for some reason the one guy without a nickname is the only one whose full name is never given). Nitz is the unofficial leader of the group, mainly because he’s the only one of them with any amount of common sense, and the others rapidly deteriorate into insanity without him around to keep order (as shown in both the “New Friends” and “Identity Crisis” episodes). However, rather than make him your average generic protagonist, the show did an interesting subversion of the Everyman character that Nitz embodies; namely, that despite him lacking the cartoonish qualities of his friends, Nitz is instead a deeply insecure and emotionally immature person, something that is most apparent in his continued obsession with his middle/high school crush Kimmy Burton, who now attends State U one year above him. This frankly unsettling crush is the focus of several episodes, and deconstructs the romantic plots of your standard college movies.
Rooming with Nitz at State U is Cal, who can best be described as American Pie’s Stiffler mixed with Lennie from Of Mice and Men. Cal embodies the borderline archeological “loveable sex maniac” character that appears to be required by the U.S Constitution to appear in every movie set in college or high school, but with an unusual twist; unlike almost every other version of this character, Cal isn’t particularly slick or charming. Women are drawn to him through a combination of good looks and what I can only assume is pity, as Cal’s general lack of intelligence makes you wonder how he got into college at all. Well, it IS a state college, he probably only had to open the door.
Filling in the requisite role of resident nerd is Gimpy, who attends the prestigious Techerson Tech School Of Technology. Having quickly established himself as the top dog among his fellow geeks (ousting their previous leader, Spud, in the process), Gimpy very rarely leaves his dorm room, which he’s transformed into a computer womb/Star Wars merch shanty town, and communicates with the others mostly through video chat. Much of the humor of the character comes from the extreme lengths he’s willing to go to avoid having to leave the confines of his room (let’s just say this much, it involves an IV drip and a bedpan), as well as the mandatory nerd obsession with Star Wars, as this was before George Lucas had managed to torch the franchise and escaped into the night with his ill-gotten Disney gains. Since he rarely leaves his room, much less the Techerson campus, the stories focused on Gimpy are limited to the world of his school, and tend to revolve around things such as rival girl hacker She-Prime (“Roommates”) or his battles with the tyrannical R.A. Rita (“Jerks”). He does however tend to intersect with whatever hijinks his friends are up to, either by being present via video, or when the others show up in person at Techerson.
Rounding out the main cast is Rocko, who for some reason is the only character without a full name. Rocko’s questionable study habits have led him to Central State Junior Community College, which is about as low as you can get in higher education without just signing up for an online college in Arizona. Rocko is essentially a Porky’s character who got left behind, and operates under the assumption that real life college is just like you’d see in the movies, with non-stop partying, frat hazing and women. Unfortunately, as we all know, actual college is mostly about work, a lesson that Rocko repeatedly refuses to learn throughout the series as he tries to make college fit his expectations. In the first episode, “Party”, Rocko begins hazing HIMSELF while trying to join the fraternity Alpha Alpha despite being told several times that hazing has been banned on campus since the 1950’s (after a pledge ended up becoming permanently brain drunk), and spends the rest of the episode thinking that the frat brothers are just testing him and subjecting himself to increasingly ridiculous and humiliating public stunts.
And then the wild dogs came.
Aside from the main quartet, the show is populated by a variety of supporting characters spread across three campuses. Nitz and Cal’s dorm mates at State U receives the most development since it’s the main location of the show, with one of the most notable characters being the aforementioned Kimmy, an acting major who remains completely oblivious to Nitz’ years-long crush on her (it would probably help if he was capable of speaking to her without choking on his tongue). Nitz’ feelings for Kimmy and the tension it creates with his friends is a running theme over the course of the show, and it’s shown several times that Nitz doesn’t actually have any genuine emotional attachment to Kimmy–what he’s attached to is the image he’s built up in his head, and it actually gets a bit uncomfortable sometimes. In fact, the first episode reveals that he has a framed photo of her on his desk. A framed photo! Of a high school crush he probably would never get to see again. The crush causes further drama with the introduction of Jesse, a film student Nitz befriends on the first day of classes, who drops increasingly unsubtle hints that she has feelings for him as the show progresses, with Nitz being too caught up in sitcom-esque plots aimed at getting Kimmy’s attention to notice. Kimmy herself is not only too distracted by the ill-planned amount of side projects she’s managed to build up in a fit of overachieving mania, but is also nursing her own crush towards senior acting major Mark, and is equally oblivious to the fact that Mark is very openly gay. Outside of the hopeless love triangle Nitz has built for himself, there is also Rob Brodie, Kruger and Dan, three film students who make up Jesse’s social circle; Mump, Gimpy’s right hand man at Techerson (alongside a group of unnamed geeks); and finally “The Dougler,” the R.A. of Nitz and Cal’s dorm who desperately wishes it was still the ’60s.
The show explored issues facing college students in the early 2000’s, with the running gag that the characters are never actually shown attending any classes. One notable episode, “Traditions,” revolved around the various school traditions that can be found not just in American schools but all over the world. The episode deals with Nitz realizing that his apathy and social shyness means he’s missing out on a lot of college experiences, and vowing to participate in the State U tradition “Exposed Expo,” where the freshman class do a nude run in the first snow of the fall. However, while preparing for the race, Nitz discovers that he’s put on the Freshman 15 (the 15 pounds of weight gained by the average college freshman), and he only has a week to drop the weight before having to expose his unsightly paunch to the world (and more importantly, Kimmy). Nitz enlists Rocko’s help in a disastrous attempt at getting in shape. Meanwhile, Gimpy has gotten mixed up in the Traditions Week at Tech mainly to defy Rita The R.A., who bans the students of her dorm from participating in the traditional pranks. Gimpy rallies his troops to commit pranks all over campus in disguise as a communal secret identity called G-Prime, while maintaining deniability by staying inside his dorm room. The two plots end up intersecting when Gimpy sneaks out and pranks State U during the Exposed Expo, right as Nitz works up the guts to actually participate, deciding that crazy college memories are more important than momentary embarrassment.
Honestly, I think he just got tired of Rocko’s training methods.
Of course, no college experience would be complete without incredibly awkward discussions about sex. The episode “Virgins” deals with Nitz starting to feel insecure about not having had sex yet (why, at 16, he’s virtually an old maid by media standards) after one of The Douglers’ painfully uninformative lessons about sex and college dating, which only gets worse after he sees Kimmy order condoms in bulk at the health center and thinks his crush goes through birth control like copy paper (as we find out at the midpoint, she works part-time at the center and helps with sex education). Nitz somehow manages to go to both sides of the extreme, at first becoming obsessed with sexual purity, and then trying to become a pickup-artist some 15 years before that was a thing. Unfortunately, he tries to learn that sleazy skill by watching old blaxploitation movies from the 70’s, which I’m pretty sure are considered hate crimes by today’s standards. His pickup act ends up being so laughably skeevy and bad that Kimmy thinks he is auditioning for a date rape educational skit, and compliments his acting skills.
Another part of college that movies insist we really need to give a shit about is school rivalries, and Undergrads is no exception. The episode “Rivalries” focuses on the decades-long feud between the State U Manatees and the unfortunately named Techerson Asses (Techerson’s mascot is a cyborg mule), a feud which ends up consuming all of the main characters. Nitz and Gimpy end up on opposite sides of an online trivia competition which the schools co-opt for their own rivalry, while Cal is recruited to be the new State U Manatee mascot, mainly because he thinks “school spirit” is a ghost that will kill him if he refuses. Meanwhile, Rocko is bitter about being left out of school competitions just because of the measly little detail that his school doesn’t have a football team, and begins single-handedly challenging potential rival colleges (or really tough high schools) by attacking their mascots in the name of Central State, though it mostly comes down to beating up Cal. In the end, everyone involved learns an important lesson: Nitz and Gimpy mend their friendship, the schools agree that “school spirit” only drives people further apart, and Rocko realizes that he shouldn’t beat Cal up for being the State U mascot–he should beat him up because he’s Cal! Hey, for him, that’s a seriously eureka-level moment.
That is a very punchable costume, though.
As a show intended for college students and teenagers, music played an important part, and like MTV’s other forays into animation, the connection to the music industry meant that Undergrads heavily featured licensed music rather than a soundtrack produced for the show. Like Clone High, which used music produced by alternative rock band Abandoned Pools, Undergrads had its own “house” band, Good Charlotte, early on in the band’s journey to stardom. The band performs the show’s opening theme, “The Click,” and even make a guest appearance in the episode “Risk” as the performers at the Spring Fling Carnival (which has devolved into a war zone in the style of Woodstock ’99, hilariously caused by Nitz not being around to prevent a very minute accident from occurring). Every episode would have a featured song, usually playing at the beginning, and playing in full during the credits, such as “Overboard” and “Paper, Plastic” by The Rosenbergs, and “Top Of the World” by Juliana Theory.
The show concluded with the episode “Screw Week,” set during the last few days before the end of freshman year, nicknamed “screw week” by the students, as it’s often used as an excuse by people to finally put the moves on their school crushes. With freshman year over, the characters are forced to start looking for new housing for the next semester, much to Gimpy’s frustration. Meanwhile, Rocko’s frat brothers are finally sick of his obnoxious behavior and tell him to not bother coming back next year, leaving him in the wind as well. Surprisingly, Rocko is the one to come up with an obvious solution: have the four rent a place together the next year. However, affordable rents in a college town is only slightly less impossible than finding a timeshare on Mars, and the plan begins to fall apart as each character begins to find separate options. The Dougler talks Cal into becoming the new R.A. for the dorm, Gimpy’s Techerson friends find an offshore oil platform for sale that they can turn into a base, and Nitz is reluctant to even return to college next year after he finds out Kimmy might drop out (yes, it’s exactly as pathetic as it sounds), leaving Rocko trying to find roommates among the various background and one-shot characters that have appeared over the season, including Bobby Whisky, an alcohol-induced hallucination he met in the episode “Drunks”, only to just end up back with his original frat, who decide that being annoying is part of being a freshman and take him back. Finally, Jesse has had all she can take of Nitz’s obliviousness, and her resentment of Kimmy finally comes to a head when Nitz ditches her at a party to finally hook up with Kimmy by random chance. Jesse chews him out in public the next morning before leaving for the summer. The final shot of the series is Nitz walking through the State U campus as the various characters clean up their dorms and meet up with their parents for the summer. And that’s the last we ever saw of them.
Don’t worry, he didn’t jump, it’s not that kind of TV show.
It’s difficult to put into words just how unique Undergrads is in terms of its fandom. When the series originally aired in 2001, it flopped like an epileptic fish in a disco, with low ratings and mixed reviews, and MTV, a network already infamous for cancelling shows with excellent reviews, cancelled the second season’s funding before the ink had dried on the contracts. Normally, this would just have consigned Undergrads to the Graveyard Of Obscure Cartoons (otherwise known as YouTube), but that’s not what happened. Thanks to constant reruns in Canada, Undergrads slowly but surely began to nurture a very devoted cult fandom. Despite MTV’s mishandling of the show, fans have stuck to the show for almost 20 years now, hanging on to Williams’ attempts at resurrecting it. But so far, all efforts have proved fruitless.
Or have they? As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, Pete Williams has spent two decades trying to bring the show back in one form or another, but has never quite succeeded, mainly because MTV holds onto copyright like a drowning man to a piece of driftwood. Since then, Williams has tried everything from pitching the show to other networks like Cartoon Network and Comedy Central to pitching an entirely separate show called We Got Issues that would include the characters from Undergrads ,to resorting to a comic book or webcomic continuation, but nothing has worked out. Despite its devoted fans, the property seems to carry some sort of gypsy curse that repels anyone with production money. But that may be about to change. On June 3rd 2018, Williams announced that he had finally managed to wrench the rights to an Undergrads movie from MTV’s dream-killing claws, and in July, announced his intentions to run a Kickstarter to fund a one-off Undergrads movie. At a time when streaming websites are increasingly financing their own animated shows, we may indeed finally be entering the perfect time for Undergrads to rise from the dead. If the movie does indeed happen, and does not fail utterly, it’s possible that Nitz and the Clique will finally have the college adventures we’ve waited so long to see.
In our fifth and final entry in this series, we’ll be returning to the work of Chris Prynoski and discover that we do indeed Dig Giant Robots with Cartoon Network’s Megas XLR.
-Henrik M.