A Boy and His Whale: The Marvelous Making of Flapjack
He was only a boy, maybe 13 or 14 at the time, but Thurop Van Orman had a dream.
Not a dream of creating a cartoon series; that would come later. It wasn't an aspirational, "I have a dream" dream either. This was your standard asleep-in-bed dream, a wish-fulfillment fantasy in which he was no longer Thurop Van Orman; instead, he was Captain Flapjack, an adventurer traveling the world on a flying motorcycle.
The dream inspired Thurop, a born storyteller, to create tales starring his fantasy self. Over the years the "Captain" part fell away, but the idea of a hero with that unlikely named stayed with him. Flash-forward some two decades: Today a would-be adventurer named Flapjack, the creation (and alter ego) of Thurop Van Orman, is indeed on the loose in Cartoon Network's animated world.
This Flapjack is a young boy, younger than the junior high school student who dreamed him up. He lives inside a whale with the unlikely Jewish grandmother name of "Bubbie" who talks in the voice of a sassy black woman. There's a captain in the picture too: a disreputable seagoing scalawag named Captain K'nuckles, inflaming the boy's imagination with tales of seagoing adventure, much to Bubbie's maternal chagrin.
Thurop was a bit of a seagoing adventurer himself in his younger days. Growing up near the water in the Florida panhandle community of Panama City, the youngster could not resist the lure of the open sea -- sort of. "When I was 14, I wanted to spend the summer on an island just off the coast, living off the land for three months. I wasn't even going to bring a pocketknife. I was going to make everything I needed out of shells and eat raw sea urchins and stuff like that."
However, the would-be Robinson Crusoe soon returned to the mainland after discovering the island was chock-full of rattlesnakes along with the occasional alligator or two, and that raw sea urchins were not all that tasty. His subsequent realization that people seemed more interested in the story of his disastrous experience than they might've been if everything had gone A-OK helped set the stage for the future Flapjack's adventures. (It did not turn him off to the idea of adventuring however; Thurop would embark on regular trips into the unknown, where "the crazier things that happened, the more excited I was about it.")
Even his unusual name has an oceanic connection, says Thurop. Not long after his island misadventure, the Van Ormans left Florida for another water-related locale, Salt Lake City, Utah. On his first day in his new school, several classmates thought he bore a resemblance to Errol Flynn's Captain Thorpe in the 1940 swashbuckler The Sea Hawk. In a fit of mispronunciation they introduced him to everyone as "little Thurop." (One might wonder why or how 1980s teenagers would be that familiar with a 45-year-old movie, but Salt Lake City is a bit on the conservative side.) The nickname stuck and the young man formerly known as "Mark" now had a new name.
Thurop's career began at Zantaro, a video game company that worked for major game developers like Electronic Arts. It was here the animation bug bit him, and bit him hard. Wasting no time, he enrolled at CalArts and shortly thereafter -- in 2002 -- approached Cartoon Network with Flapjack. "They didn't take me too seriously -- the person I pitched to was watching TV while I pitched. Even though they acted like they had notes and stuff, I realized no one would take me seriously until I had some experience."
Thurop found himself caught in the eternal catch-22: "I tried to get a job to get some experience, but no one would give me a job because I didn't have any experience. I finally got an unpaid internship at Cartoon Network and then everything happened really fast.
"I started going to Powerpuff story meetings and then they started buying ideas from me. I worked really hard those first two years to make a name for myself, doing storyboards on Powerpuff Girls, [The Grim Adventures of] Billy and Mandy, Camp Lazlo. As soon as I started to make an impression, people realized there was this new person here who had some new ideas, that's when I pitched [Flapjack] again. This was probably in 2003. It was crazy, a lot of work, but everyone who does it and is successful at it, it's all they do in their spare time."
The five-year process from Cartoon Network's first go-ahead to Flapjack's 2008 premiere began with the channel asking for a show bible. "They wanted an idea of the dynamics between characters, how they would drive the story and play out over a series. It was actually really good for me to figure out those relationships before I told the stories. You kind of have to do both at same time but it saved me some heartache in the long run.
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