‘Regular Show’: The Most Inventive Show of TV’s Nostalgia Boom

The phenomenon commonly known as “Peak TV,” searching for ever-more hooks to keep viewers interested, has produced a corresponding boom in nostalgic programming. Shows have mined the last century for all it’s worth—from Mad Men’s stylish, hollow 1960s to The Knick’s dark, foreboding 1910s to whatever year it is on this season of Masters of Sex. (This impulse to bottle up the past and make it palatable finds its natural outlet, of course, in the obscene number of shows depicting the 1980s.) But one show that’s been around longer than almost all of these outdoes them all for genuine inventiveness with the past: Cartoon Network’s Regular Show.

Regular Show, now in its eighth and final season, follows mega-slackers Mordecai the bluejay (voiced by series creator J.G. Quintel) and Rigby the raccoon (William Salyers) on their jobs as park groundskeepers. Outside of the fact that they’re animals, Mordecai and Rigby are pretty typical guys of a certain age (23): They play video games, watch B-movies, and improvise absurd raps about everything from keyboards to clocks to hummus. The other characters are just as ridiculous, filling out the other archetypes you would expect in a workplace comedy, including the good-natured, simple, lollipop-headed Pops, park boss and gumball machine Benson, and gruff handyman Skips—a yeti voiced by Mark Hamill.

Mordecai and Rigby’s immaturity is a perfect fit for Regular Show interest in the 1980s: Their totally awesome, slacker approach to life finds its outlet in the primitive video games they play, the cheesy horror movies they watch, and the rocking music they listen to—essentially, they’re creatures of slick, ’80s excess without any of the attendant moral rot, capitalist decay, or cocaine abuse. But while the show wears its influences on its sleeve (how could it try to hide them, when its earliest episodes include a gigantic, villainous cell phone and a dojo where martial arts are based solely on wearing mullets?), it’s built something new on that foundation.

The medium of animation is a help here, transforming what would ordinarily be signs of sleaziness, or at least the wear of time (keytars, ninja shoes, VHS tapes, enormous desktop computers) into outlandish symbols of cool. Trying to pull off intense shoulder pads might look lame in a live-action show, depending on the acting and production design, but it’s hard not to be taken in by the way they fit with the blocky shapes that make up the park. This is a world that includes a douchey biker gang of unicorns, a pack of baby ducks who can morph into a robot, and an epic band called Fist Pump.

And, like many cultural depictions of the 1980s, each of these characters appears to be rather simple and entertaining at first, before revealing hidden depth. (For a long time, green ogre Muscle Man’s primary character traits were taking his shirt off at all opportunities and responding to any and all prompts with “My mom!”) Over the course of the show’s 250-plus episodes, Regular Show has allowed its characters to mature in believable, roundabout ways.