What the hell is the Mumblerhood?

The Mumblerhood, quite simply, was the first proper cartoon series I made using Flash, and I started it during 2004. Having already made a whole bunch of random animations using Deluxe Paint Animation (those were the days!) and then Macromedia Flash, I started watching a number of proper cartoons on the Internet. I was introduced to one particular cartoon by my mate Dave (who, as you might expect, is the template for Dave in the Mumblerhood), called Bonus Stage, which was made by Matt Wilson. I instantly fell in love with the simple concept - two guys who share a house get into a number of increasingly crazy situations. I started coming up with ideas for my own cartoon series, and I eventually decided to take Bonus Stage's format, chuck in another two guys and another house, and that was that. The addition of another house played into the Mumblerhood's stories pretty well, as one house (Rich and Tom's) represented the calmer, more responsible characters, while the other house (Andy and Dave's) represented the more crazy, do-whatever-you-feel-like characters. So who were the people I based the Mumblerhood characters on? Well...

For the record, Andy and Dave aren't anywhere near as insane as they are in the cartoon, and Rich is pretty damn smart in real life - a far cry from his oaf-like cartoon representation. With that said, my personality is pretty spot-on - easily irritable and generally a bit of a hard-ass. Wow, I'm really selling myself here aren't I?

Moving swiftly on. I guess you probably have no idea where the name 'The Mumblerhood' came from, right? Well, the series was originally going to be called the Neighbourhood but this seemed a little generic to me, so I started to think of a more personal name. One of the series' main characters, Rich, has a fairly unique surname (Manber) and a whole series of nicknames have come from it - the one that I use the most is Mumbler. Thus, I took this name, mixed it with 'neighbourhood', and thus the Mumblerhood was born. By the way, we call him Mumbler because it sounds vaguely like his real surname and he does indeed have a tendency to mumble. That may sound a little rude, but let's face it - Mumbler is far better than some of the other names I call him, such as Manbucket, Manboner, Scrumbler and Richard Hamburglar.

You may wonder why I haven't submitted the Mumblerhood to Newgrounds, and there's a very simple reason for this - it's too full of in-jokes and has next to no voice acting. However, unlike some of my earlier work (such as the Matrix spoofs) I do still find the Mumblerhood entertaining, but it still really is just a precursor to the Everyday Adventures of Steve. This isn't to say the Mumblerhood is incapable of making you laugh anymore, because even I still find bits of it funny, but the Steve series really is superior.

If I had to pick my favourite episodes, I'd easily choose Race (episode 2) and the Christmas Special (episode 4). I chose Race because the real-life version of Andy is a bit of a boy racer, and the thought of the four of us having a genuine drag-race down Watford highstreet is absolutely hilarious. As for the Christmas Special, this is one of the only episodes that I really felt did its job - it wasn't overly long (unlike episode 3, which just seemed to go on forever despite having very little story) and yet told a simple but effective story. Plus, in real-life, if we sent Andy off to buy alcohol for a party it is highly likely he'd come back with the cheapest vodka available. For the record, Skratalov vodka is completely made-up, but Pavlov isn't - it is utterly horrible and costs even less than Tesco own brand vodka. Now that's saying something!

That's about it for now, but remember that the Mumblerhood series isn't over yet - Steve may be in full swing, but the beginning of the Mumblerhood 5 still exists on my computer, and there are plenty of stories I've yet to tell within the Mumblerhood universe. One last thing - the series' first comic adaptation is available in the Comics section.