Six Things that Writers Can Learn from the Creators of Aqua Teen Hunger Force
Before Rick and Morty became Adult Swim’s runaway hit, one of the late-night block’s greatest successes was Aqua Teen Hunger Force.
During its run from 2001 to 2015, Aqua Teen amassed 139 episodes, a theatrically released movie, a PlayStation 2 video game, and a live comedy tour. At its peak, the series pulled in more young adult viewers than its network television competition. And it was immortalized with appearances in two of TV’s most revered dramas, The Sopranos and Breaking Bad.
In 2022, seven years after the series was canceled, the self-absorbed Master Shake, no-nonsense Frylock, and naïve Meatwad were finally revived — first as part of a digital short series and then for a direct-to-video movie. And next month, on Sunday, November 26, 2023, Aqua Teen Hunger Force returns for a 12th season consisting of five new episodes.
But longtime fans and newcomers alike might wonder: How did creators Matt Maiellaro and Dave Willis ever come up with the show’s offbeat humor? And how did they sustain it for as long as they did? What follows is an attempt at a thorough answer.
Having scoured many print, podcast, and video interviews with the duo, I’ve pulled six things that writers can learn from Maiellaro and Willis’s creative process on Aqua Teen. These six “things” are not necessarily lessons that the creators suggest or urge anyone to follow, but observations of what they’ve done and said — based on their own words. Whether obvious or new, these may be useful to aspiring writers of any genre or medium.
1. Draft without judgment
Maiellaro and Willis completed their first drafts in one sitting by restraining from second-guessing each other.
Speaking with the Wizard and the Bruiser podcast, Willis recalled that it was Maiellaro who brought this nonjudgmental attitude to their collaboration:
“Matt would work the keyboard and Matt would throw everything in. … The thing that came out of your mouth, he would get it on the page. And sometimes it would have a reality and a spark … It just felt real, like two people trying to make each other laugh. And I thought that was a huge lesson to me. Like, he never judged it. He never said, ‘Well, I don’t know if that’s gonna work.’ … He would just be like, ‘Fine, just keep going.’”
It was with this approach that they first conceived of the Aqua Teens. Willis recalled to Paste that they wasted no time deliberating names:
“[T]he first idea that each of us came up with just went right into the script. Matt said ‘Master Shake.’ I said ‘Meatwad.’ [H]e said ‘Frylock.’ I said ‘Aqua Teen Hunger Force.’ … We just put it right in and we were very happy with ourselves.”
By building on each other’s ideas instead of shooting them down, they avoided overthinking and maintained a quick writing routine. “We write a first draft in one day,” Maiellaro explained to SuicideGirls, which took them anywhere from two to eight hours to complete. (Since Aqua Teen episodes ran under fifteen minutes, the duo skipped writing outlines.)
The series’ third DVD release provides a glimpse at their writing process, and the result of that afternoon’s work was a draft for “The Cloning,” one of 24 episodes that aired in 2003.
Twenty-four was an unusual number of episodes to expect from an animated show with two writers. A more traditional animated program like Family Guy, which aired about as many episodes yearly, brought them to fruition with a staff of around 17 writers.
So the task was demanding. “[W]e were slammed,” Maiellaro recalled, “and the only way to write 24 was to do them that fast.” After completing a draft, it was mere days later that they recorded it. “We start on Monday, and by Friday, it’s done,” Maiellaro said at a 2004 Comic-Con panel.
Despite their pace, they found chances to revise. As Maiellaro explained, they would “mess with it during the week when we have time.” Willis told Vulture a script could undergo “massive changes all along the way.”
By Friday, after days of mulling over their script, Willis would feel “completely bored” with it and “want to try to make up something else that will surprise me and surprise Matt.” They, therefore, could find themselves “rewriting the show as we’re recording it,” Maiellaro said. This involved giving their voice actors — which regularly included Willis and occasionally included Maiellaro — the leeway to adlib. After incorporating the improvised lines, Maiellaro estimated that a typical episode would “follow about 80%” of the script they wrote.
By completing a first draft in hours, tweaking it over the days that followed, and trusting their actors to enhance what was on the page, the basic cable cartoon was able to churn out as many episodes as one airing on broadcast television.
Speaking to the quality of the Aqua Teen episodes cranked out at this pace, Maiellaro said, “I guess [we’re] lucky that they came out good.”
2. Find value in what’s rejected
Before Master Shake, Frylock, and Meatwad led their own show, they were created for a one-and-done appearance in another series.
By 1999, after years of writing for Space Ghost Coast to Coast — the animated talk show helmed by a ’60s superhero repurposed into an aloof and unfocused narcissist — Maiellaro and Willis were bored. And it was evident in their writing. “[S]ubconsciously being burned out on Space Ghost and wanting to try to come up with some other thing” drove them to draft a script that barely featured the main character.
In that episode, Space Ghost was to be indebted to a fast-food restaurant and cast aside as a group of its mascots hijacked his show. “[O]ur bosses really didn’t want us to make [an episode] where Space Ghost didn’t have any lines…” Willis explained. Following multiple rewrites — Maiellaro claimed “20 or 30” — the fast-food mascots were shelved. And the idea of Space Ghost ceding his show to a business that makes him promote it became the basis of a different episode, “Kentucky Nightmare.”
But Maiellaro and Willis loved those shelved fast-food characters too much to let them go. They felt like they’d crafted “well-rounded … network quality characters” who could carry their own stories. So, when Cartoon Network began accepting pitches for its new Adult Swim late-night block, Maiellaro and Willis proposed a show built around the food items, reviving what had been rejected.
The reviving didn’t end there. To meet the demands of producing multiple episodes, it helped Willis and Maiellaro to rehash more ideas first intended for Space Ghost. In fact, Willis estimated to The Adult Swim Podcast that “seven of [the first ten episodes] were sort of repurposed, rejected scripts of Space Ghost … that [the head of Adult Swim] Mike [Lazzo] had sort of shit-canned for one reason or another, and we were like, ‘I always kinda liked this idea … maybe we can bring this back.’”
One character reimagined from an unproduced Space Ghost would have been the hero’s neighbor. Dominic, an “older Italian American who was tormented by Space Ghost’s late night dance parties with himself,” would have paid Space Ghost a visit to request — then threaten — him to “keep it down, or I’m gonna keep it down for ya.” Dominic’s exasperation and aggravation, along with the voice Willis had in mind for him, inspired the creation of Carl, the Aqua Teens’ next-door neighbor and a series regular.
Carl was ultimately crucial to the show’s appeal. As an audience surrogate reacting to the absurdity and horrors around him, he grounded the show (despite being odd himself). Willis said Carl’s presence reminded viewers that the characters “actually live in a human world” and not one of pure fantasy.
Willis told The Adult Swim Podcast of yet another discarded Space Ghost in which the talk show host would have gotten a doll that sings and dances, incessantly. But as Space Ghost falls in love with the doll, the doll would grow to detest Space Ghost and dance its way into a fireplace, preferring to die than spend another minute with him. “We loved that so much,” Willis said, but it was “universally hated and killed.”
But once Aqua Teen Hunger Force was underway, Maiellaro and Willis recalled elements of that script to write the memorable “Dumber Dolls.”
This time, the childlike Meatwad wants a “Jiggle Billy” — a jolly, dancing hillbilly doll — but must settle for a cheaper “Happy Time Harry” — a doll of a crabby pessimist who wants pills and a nap. With comedian David Cross voicing Harry, Willis felt like Aqua Teen had received a significant “seal of approval” from a creator of one of his favorite series, Mr. Show. Cross afterwards expressed his approval more explicitly and referred to Aqua Teen as “one of the funniest shows on TV” in 2004.
As for that Space Ghost script that would have introduced the Aqua Teens? It, too, was later revived.
Bearing little resemblance to their series counterparts, the Aqua Teens of the Space Ghost episode “Baffler Meal” embody the designs and voices (and maybe the personalities) originally contemplated for them.
Maiellaro and Willis — in mining their scrapped scripts for premises and characters to revitalize and improve — wound up with works both stronger and more resonant than they might have been in their original form.
3. Find inspiration in day-to-day life
Like most shows on Adult Swim, Aqua Teen has been diminished as randomness, thought up by “guys on drugs” and enjoyable only to viewers who are “really, really stoned or easily transfixed by the absurd.”
Appearing on The Adult Swim Podcast, Dave Willis bristled at this characterization: “It’s not fucking random. It’s like, choices were made.” And the choices he and Maiellaro made, Willis contended, were simply different.
Not only were those choices guided by “what makes us laugh, what we think is funny,” Maiellaro explained, but also by their own personal experiences and observations. “I think everything we’ve ever done is a reflection” of reality, Willis said.
In fact, Maiellaro and Willis often stumbled onto story ideas by first discussing what was new with them. As Willis told UPROXX, a typical writing session started with a chat about their lives and their grievances of the moment. From there, they would “riff off of it and take it to an absurd place.” Before they knew it, their conversation would have spawned a new premise or script.
Any atypical occurrences in their lives could spark an idea. Maiellaro explained to the Dancing is Forbidden podcast that after he donated his car to a kidney foundation, the duo wrote “Kidney Car,” in which Carl did exactly that. The episode “Ezekiel,” in which Shake meets his supposed son, Willis told Collider, was written at a time when Maiellaro and Willis were both “suffering baby fatigue.” Willis added, “Episodes that involve real estate sort of coincide with times that we were buying houses.”
Even the character Carl — despite being, by Willis’s admission, “a caricature of a state [New Jersey] that we’ve never really visited” — was influenced by real-life people. Among them, Willis explained to UPROXX and Wizard and the Bruiser, were his own father and uncles and their friends, who were all from Long Island. Carl also drew from the New Jerseyans who Willis butted heads with at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. One of them, Willis’s college roommate “Dolla Bill $orrentino” of Toms River, N.J., was “really crazy, crazy into the Giants” and compelled Willis’s mom to remark after a visit to Willis, “Your roommate touches his balls a lot.”
It may be because Maiellaro and Willis drew inspiration from their lives that Willis declared confidently to Vulture, “I think Matt and I could make this show forever.” Maiellaro, too, expressed no concern about running out of ideas. He suggested to Animation World Network in 2007 that the show could go on because he related to the characters as “just regular people hanging out.”
Accumulating new experiences and running them through their surreal comedic filters, Maiellaro and Willis were confident they could keep the stories coming.
4. Be guided by passion, get started, and learn from mistakes
Despite the years Maiellaro and Willis spent writing for Space Ghost Coast to Coast, launching their own series wasn’t easy. “We knew how to make Space Ghost. We didn’t know how to make an actual animated show,” Dave Willis said on The Jeff Rubin Jeff Rubin Show.
Accustomed to the Space Ghost process of recycling animation and backgrounds from the hero’s 1960s series, Maiellaro and Willis figured they could tackle their newly greenlit Aqua Teen in a similar way and assemble each episode from “pre-built stuff,” using the same tech they were used to.
They got started and found that it didn’t work. “We just did everything wrong,” Willis told The A.V. Club. Ultimately, according to Matt Maiellaro, “It took an entire year to develop, animate and put one show together.” The experience of producing that pilot taught them “a lot of expensive lessons.”
But the setbacks didn’t deter them — and neither did concerns about the show finding support from viewers or executives. As Willis said to Under the Radar, they were so galvanized by “the ignorance of excitement” that they “barreled forward just because we loved it.”
This love of their characters compelled them to write and record a second Aqua Teen episode before it was approved — without clueing in their boss. “They would have been totally in the right if they just fired both of our asses right then and there,” Willis said, but despite getting Mike Lazzo “furious,” the duo’s enthusiasm paid off.
Only after completing a few episodes were the creators able to shape Aqua Teen into the best version of itself. At the time they worked on the pilot, Maiellaro believed it was “the best thing we had ever done.” Looking back later, he realized that it was the fourth episode where “the show really found its way.”
Getting through that first batch of episodes also enabled the creators to clarify their vision and shed an unneeded element: the characters’ occupation as detectives.
When Maiellaro and Willis pitched Aqua Teen as a series, they didn’t specify what the characters would be doing episode after episode, besides “just hang out” as “things happen to them.” So, Mike Lazzo told them to make the characters detectives to ensure the show had, Willis explained, “something that people could grab onto.”
They weren’t thrilled about it. “We were just being forced into a template and that’s not what we wanted to do,” Maiellaro told Paste. But after the first few episodes, as their intentions became clearer, tasking the characters with investigative work stopped seeming necessary. “By episode four we were unconsciously writing it out of the show,” Willis said.
Since then, the Aqua Teens’ detective work was referred to rarely and mainly for laughs. Ultimately, the show developed into what Maiellaro and Willis envisioned when they pitched it: “It’s just three guys hanging out and shit lands and happens to ’em and they have to deal with it.”
By getting started and letting their passion guide them, Maiellaro and Willis worked past technical and financial hurdles, as well as a creative compromise, to produce the show they wanted to make, as they saw fit.
5. Keep it simple
In December 1982, the video game company Atari hastily released E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, a game based on the hit movie of that summer. Since then, legend had it that the game was so poorly received, Atari buried all remaining copies in a New Mexico desert. (A 2014 excavation finally revealed there was some truth to the legend after all.)
And in the early ’00s, that story inspired a pivotal Aqua Teen episode.
Initially, Maiellaro and Willis’s idea was for the Aqua Teens to discover their home had been built on a failed video game burial ground. The cast would be haunted by the pixelated ghosts of a rejected game, presumably one set in space. Those ghosts would be known as the Mooninites.
But as Maiellaro and Willis started writing, they soon realized their premise required too long of an explanation. “[W]e started thinking like, god, what a backstory,” Willis explained. “It’s like you’d have to like put up three pages of expository stuff…”
Deeming the idea “convoluted,” they did away with the burial ground backstory altogether.
Rather than ghosts or video game characters, Maiellaro and Willis simply made the Mooninites a couple of alien visitors. “I think there was a moment where we were like, ‘Wouldn’t it be funnier if they were just from the moon, and they thought they were badass and they thought that the Earth was their moon?’” Willis recalled. Still, the Mooninites retained a pixelated appearance, which highlighted the irony of the two braggarts touting themselves as advanced beings.
That episode, “Mayhem of the Mooninites,” in addition to being a favorite of Willis’s, marked a turning point for the creators as the moment that “the show started to feel like it was working.” The Mooninites became fan-favorite characters, were the focus of another seven episodes, and made several more appearances.
Even after “Mayhem of the Mooninites,” it helped Maiellaro and Willis to be reminded to reduce an episode’s bloat.
On the DVD commentary for “Space Conflict Beyond Pluto,” Willis revealed that an early draft not only introduced the alien duo of The Plutonians, but also the anthropomorphic mass of mold known as Ol’ Drippy. “But,” Willis recalled, “someone said it was ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag, so we split it up into two episodes.” By scattering those characters across two episodes instead of packing them into one, the Plutonians were able to stand out more prominently, and they too became recurring guest characters. And “Ol’ Drippy,” meanwhile, stood out to Willis as another early favorite.
By making their episodes “a lot simpler to understand,” Maiellaro and Willis strongly endeared their guest characters to viewers and, again, wound up with better results than what they first imagined.
6. Set expectations and defy them
To Dave Willis, Space Ghost Coast to Coast was a writing “boot camp.”
Its creator Mike Lazzo, seen by those around him as a “pop-culture and literature savant,” wanted to be surprised and see what he hadn’t seen before. And if he wasn’t surprised, Willis said, “he’d be like, ‘I’ve seen this, I’ve seen this, I’ve seen this,’” and turn down one script after another. Lazzo pushed his writers to think further and further outside the box and ingrained in Maiellaro and Willis his philosophy of “if you can’t be funny, be interesting.”
When Maiellaro and Willis went on to create Aqua Teen, also overseen by Lazzo, they continued to aim to surprise. “It’s about setting expectations and then defying them,” Willis said of their humor.
They realized, though, that viewers would eventually recognize patterns in their work and expect what seemed novel early in the show’s run. So, to throw off their audience, they deliberately broke their own patterns.
One such departure from the norm was their discarding of the show’s cold open.
In its first forty-one episodes, Aqua Teen starts with a brief scene featuring the mad scientist Dr. Weird and his assistant Steve. At first, those segments introduced or alluded to the episode’s antagonist; they soon evolved into self-contained absurdist bits, unrelated to anything that followed.
After a while, Willis said, “I think we just got burnt out on [them].” Opposed to continuing the Dr. Weird segments “out of a sense of nostalgia or tradition … two of the worst things in the world,” Maiellaro and Willis replaced them with fragments of a rejected spinoff, and afterwards scrapped the cold open altogether.
Breaking a pattern, of course, was bound to upset some viewers. Disappointed fans demanded more Dr. Weird. But when asked if he worried in advance about fans not liking this change to the show, Willis answered, “No, never.” Maiellaro and Willis concerned themselves more with what would hold their own attention.
Going into their fifth season, another change to the status quo held their attention. Worn out after working on both the series and its movie at the same time, they started the season without their three main characters. Instead, the focus was shifted onto Carl and the Aqua Teens’ landlord Markula seeking new tenants in their absence.
Maiellaro and Willis even considered doing that whole season without the titular trio. The star of the show would have been the Aqua Teens’ house, and after a group of tenants eventually settled in, they would “slowly acquire the traits of the Aqua Teens until by the end they’ve become the Aqua Teens.” Ultimately, Maiellaro and Willis made it to only two episodes without the show’s leads. “[W]e started to miss the characters and brought them back,” Willis admitted to Swimcast. Though the two episodes were instantly declared by some fans to be the show’s worst ever, they offered a change of pace and, for other fans, raised Carl’s profile further.
Defying expectations also entailed producing episodes with a different tone or visual style. “Party All the Time,” which Willis “always wanted to do,” has the characters cope with an unusually serious topic as Frylock is diagnosed with and treated for cancer. “Rocket Horse & Jet Chicken” is designed to resemble childlike crayon drawings; “Mouth Quest” is distinguished by its merging of stop-motion animation with live-action.
Behind the scenes, not every deviation was welcomed. Mike Lazzo supposedly did not like, and nearly did not air, “Last Last One Forever and Ever,” a live-action episode that reimagines Shake as a meek wannabe writer, played by comedian Jon Benjamin, and Frylock as his cold and discouraging housemate, played by rapper T-Pain.
Finally, Maiellaro and Willis subverted fans’ expectations with changes to the show’s presentation.
After seven years as the Aqua Teen Hunger Force, with the same opening and closing sequences accompanied by rapper Schoolly D, Maiellaro and Willis began a tradition of rebranding the series annually.
Renamed Aqua Unit Patrol Squad 1 in 2011, Aqua Something You Know Whatever in 2012, Aqua TV Show Show in 2013, and Aqua Teen Hunger Force Forever in 2015, the series received newly animated title sequences, coupled with new songs. “I think I relish the idea that we work at a network that applaud[s] us completely destroying our brand yet again,” Willis told Bubbleblabber.
Inevitably, this decision, too, met with backlash. Some viewers felt inconvenienced by having to reprogram their DVRs or TiVos to find the show under its latest name. A nod to this hassle, one title change rumored for the show — but was probably a quip someone took too seriously — was “Aqua TiVo Avoidance Plan.”
Why would Maiellaro and Willis risk confusing its audience by doing this?
“It’s just something fun for us to do,” Maiellaro explained to Comic Book Resources. “[T]o be able to go in and do something fresh like change the open and the close all the time is really fun for us.” And surely it was fun for those fans who looked forward to seeing the next season’s newest packaging.
To keep themselves engaged and stave off stagnation, Maiellaro and Willis understood that they sometimes had to cast aside fans’ apprehensions towards change. Had they stuck to a pattern, as some viewers would have preferred, it’s possible everyone would have tired of the show by now.
In summary…
From Maiellaro and Willis’s routine and results, writers may see the benefits of drafting without judgment, finding value in what’s been rejected, finding inspiration in day-to-day life, seizing one’s own passion to get started and learn from mistakes, keeping one’s work simple, and setting expectations and defying them.
For additional context to any of the quotes above, read or listen to the sources below:
“85 — Aqua Teen/Squidbillies Creator Dave Willis,” The Jeff Rubin Jeff Rubin Show, April 29, 2013, https://headgum.com/the-jeff-rubin-jeff-rubin-show/85-aqua-teensquidbillies-creator-dave-willis.
“Aqua Teen Hunger Games w/ JAY WADE EDWARDS,” Cartoon Barroom: An Animated Podcast w/ Ashley & Steven, April 24, 2021, https://open.spotify.com/episode/20b1bv4WQsXxyw7tJg8i51.
“Arts & Entertainment Industry Forum 9/20/2010: Cartoonist/Voice Actor Dave Willis,” Loyola University School of Music Industry, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqB6_VgcFEE.
Ashley Burns and Chloe Schildhause, “The Creators Of ‘Aqua Teen Hunger Force’ Reflect On The Show’s 13-Season Run,” UPROXX, August 26, 2015, https://uproxx.com/tv/aqua-teen-hunger-force-series-finale-creators-interview/.
B. Alan Orange, “COMIC-CON 2004: The Guys (and Girl) Behind Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim Rock The House!,” Movieweb, July 27, 2004, https://movieweb.com/comic-con-2004-the-guys-and-girl-behind-cartoon-networks-adult-swim-rock-the-house/.
“Bonus: A Conversation with Dave Willis,” Wizard and the Bruiser, September 2020, https://open.spotify.com/episode/077ebv1pUaCU1EJcIpwsxt.
“Bonus 3: Casper Kelly and Dave Willis,” Doin’ It with Mike Sacks, October 21, 2016, https://ia803008.us.archive.org/4/items/podcast_doin-it-with-mike-sacks_bonus-casper-kelly-dave-wil_1000376954080/podcast_doin-it-with-mike-sacks_bonus-casper-kelly-dave-wil_1000376954080.mp3?ignore=x.mp3.
Craig J. Clark, “‘Aqua Teen’ on the Big Screen: Interview with Matt Maiellaro & Dave Willis,” Animation World Network, April 12, 2007, https://www.awn.com/animationworld/aqua-teen-big-screen-interview-matt-maiellaro-dave-willis.
Daniel Robert Epstein, “AQUA TEEN HUNGER FORCE CREATORS,” SuicideGirls, March 4, 2004, https://www.suicidegirls.com/girls/anderswolleck/blog/2678924/aqua-teen-hunger-force-creators/.
Dave Itzkoff, “Destroying Television, Toon by Toon,” The New York Times, March 13, 2005, https://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/13/arts/television/destroying-television-toon-by-toon.html.
“Dave Willis: Shock,” CreativeMornings HQ, November 13, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNcqGYWu7Og.
David Wolinsky, “Dana Snyder and Dave Willis on Aqua Teen Hunger Force’s limitless potential,” The A.V. Club, November 11, 2009, https://www.avclub.com/dana-snyder-and-dave-willis-on-aqua-teen-hunger-force-s-1798218275.
“EP. 31 — Talkin’ Squidbillies ‘n Such with Dave Willis,” Radio Labyrinth, July 13, 2016, https://player.fm/series/radio-labyrinth-181342/ep-31-talkin-squidbillies-n-such-with-dave-willis.
“Episode 1 — Dave Willis and Casper Kelly,” The Adult Swim Podcast, April 22, 2019, https://www.adultswim.com/podcast/adult-swim-podcast/1.
“Fifty-One,” [adult swim] central: Swimcast, December 12, 2008, https://web.archive.org/web/20110723114621/www.adultswimcentral.com/swimcast/fiftyone.mp3.
Garrett Martin, “The Life and Death of Aqua Teen Hunger Force,” Paste, June 17, 2015, https://www.pastemagazine.com/article/aqua-teen-hunger-force-forever.
“I am Dave Willis. AMA,” Reddit, August 23, 2012, https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ypjjg/i_am_dave_willis_ama/.
Jake Uitti, “Matt Maiellaro and Dave Willis on the Origins of Adult Swim’s ‘Aqua Teen Hunger Force’ High-Caliber Work,” Under the Radar, December 14, 2020, https://www.undertheradarmag.com/interviews/matt_maiellaro_and_dave_willis_on_the_origins_of_adult_swims_aqua_teen_hung/.
James Norton, “‘Just Bring ’em In From Space’ An Interview With the Creators of Aqua Teen Hunger Force,” Flak Magazine, September 22, 2003, https://web.archive.org/web/20060613042858/http:/flakmag.com/features/aquateen.html.
John Linn, “Aqua Teen Hunger Force Creator Dave Willis Heads to Supercon,” Broward Palm Beach New Times, October 30, 2008, https://www.browardpalmbeach.com/news/aqua-teen-hunger-force-creator-dave-willis-heads-to-supercon-6312510.
John Reha, “CCI: Radical Axis Studios Panel,” Comic Book Resources, August 8, 2010, https://www.cbr.com/cci-radical-axis-studios-panel/.
John Schwarz, “EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: DAVE WILLIS (@DAVEWILLIS2) CO-CREATOR OF AQUA TEEN PART 1,” Bubbleblabber, June 28, 2012, https://www.bubbleblabber.com/2012/06/exclusive-interview-dave-willis-davewillis2-co-creator-of-aqua-teen-part-1/.
“Masterclass — Dave Willis,” Loyola University School of Music Industry, July 14, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKrvCpoLAHs.
“Matt Maiellaro Interview | ATHF Co-Creator, Voice of Err and Markula,” Dancing Is Forbidden: An Aqua Teen Hunger Force Exploration, December 12, 2022, https://www.dancingisforbidden.com/e/matt-maiellaro/.
Michelle Falkenstein, “Jersey Footlights,” The New York Times, November 7, 2004, https://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/07/nyregion/movies/jersey-footlights.html.
Nathan Rabin, “Matt Maiellaro & Dave Willis,” The A.V. Club, June 15, 2005, https://www.avclub.com/matt-maiellaro-dave-willis-1798208514.
Philip Stamato, “Saying Goodbye to ‘Aqua Teen Hunger Force’ with Co-Creator Dave Willis,” Vulture, July 22, 2015, https://www.vulture.com/2015/07/saying-goodbye-to-aqua-teen-hunger-force-with-co-creator-dave-willis.html.
Spencer Hall, “Interview: Aqua Teen Co-Creator Dave Willis,” SB Nation, May 14, 2008, https://www.sbnation.com/2008/5/14/1640441/interview-aqua-teen-co-creator.
Steve Sunu, “Matt Maiellaro On ‘Knowbodys’ & ‘Aqua Teens,’” Comic Book Resources, January 27, 2012, https://www.cbr.com/matt-maiellaro-on-knowbodys-aqua-teens/.
Steve Weintraub, “AQUA TEEN HUNGER FORCE Interviews,” Collider, April 11, 2007, https://collider.com/aqua-teen-hunger-force-interviews/.
“We are Dave Willis and Jim Fortier, the writer-producers of Squidbillies!,” Reddit, September 17, 2014, https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2goygm/we_are_dave_willis_and_jim_fortier_the/.
