It's been a long time since radio provided inspiration for television shows, but NPR's popular Car Talk has ended the drought with As the Wrench Turns. All images © PBS.

It's perhaps appropriate that Howard K. Grossman first got the idea to turn National Public Radio's popular Car Talk show into an animated series while he was on the road. The longtime PBS producer (and longtime fan of the show) was in Europe working on a project, with a set of Car Talk CDs to keep him company when...

"A light bulb went off in my head: people love their laugh, their voices," he explained, referring to Tom and Ray Magliozzi, the show's stars. "These guys should be animated characters. It's a real odd duck in the NPR world, their number-one entertainment show -- a show about cars and car repair which really isn't about cars and car repair. I decided to approach them when I got home about doing an animated series."

"I contacted them via the general email address on their website in February 2001. A few weeks later I got an email back from Doug Berman, their radio show producer: 'They always pictured themselves as cartoon characters,' he said. 'When you flesh your idea out a little bit more, come on up, we'd love to talk to you about it.' I saved the email. I may frame it."

"Up" is Cambridge, Massachusetts, or "our fair city," as the Magliozzis refer to the metropolis on their radio series. The siblings, who call themselves "Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers" on air, have been doing Car Talk for over 30 years, first as a local show and then nationally since 1987. Their goofball repartee attracts thousands of non-car owners who tune in for their off-the-wall silliness, along with genuine motorheads intrigued by the unusual vehicular problems listeners ask them to solve.

"Our first idea was a direct adaptation of the radio show," Grossman recalls, using the existing soundtracks as the basis for the show's animation. "I had the rights to their entire archives. I spent a lot of time in the Car Talk Plaza offices above JFK Street in Cambridge going through their shows.

"We did a few demos to see if that approach would work -- animatics with a bit of animation. The guys liked them, so I did some more development, PowerPoint presentations, and started pitching to the networks beginning with ABC/Disney in Burbank. They absolutely loved it. They said 'this is a no-brainer' and we thought we had a slam dunk there. It turned out the creative people wanted to proceed, but the marketers didn't like the show."

Grossman's next stop was Cartoon Network, where he hoped the project would fit into the relatively new late-night Adult Swim block, although, he says, "wherever they put it, I would've been happy." He pitched the show to then-SVP of Original Animation Linda Simensky, who loved it and was "definitely disappointed" when Cartoon Network chose not to pick it up.

Time went by and Grossman continued to develop his Car Talk project, which would ultimately be titled As the Wrench Turns. This time around, he brought it to PBS. "We pitched it to them four years before we finally got the green light. They were excited about it, but we could never get them over the finish line -- until Paula [Kerger] came in [as PBS's new president and CEO]. Then it happened."

Producer Howard K. Grossman pitched the show to ABC/Disney and Cartoon Network, but it was PBS that gave it a green light.

John Wilson, PBS senior vice president for programming, gave the project the go-ahead. The show began evolving towards its ultimate form. "PBS did focus groups," says Grossman," while I did my own privately. What we learned was that people liked it, but we consistently got feedback from the fans that they might quickly tire of the show 'because we've heard all this stuff before.' They wanted to know what the guys were like outside of the show. That's when we got the idea of doing an animated sitcom, using the radio show as a jumping-off point."

A creative team was assembled, headed by animation veterans Bill Kroyer as executive producer and Tom Sito as the series' director. "Howard's been putting this together for years," reflects Sito. "He and I sat down seven years ago. He told me 'I've got the nonfiction rights to this radio show and I thought it would make a good animated series.' He kept calling me, phoning me in Taipei, 'the deal's gonna happen, you're part of the team.'"

The show's writing is overseen by Doug Berman, Tom and Ray's writer/producer since their pre-NPR days. "We tried a number of different writers, but nobody captured the essence of Car Talk's humor, nobody can write Tom and Ray better than Doug," says Grossman. "Doug came in as the head writer and I gave him Tom Minton [a story editor and scripter on Tiny Toons and many other shows] as a safety net, to analyze things that work and things that don't in animation.

"Our creative rule was that Doug was responsible for Tom and Ray's dialogue and our other writers [including Minton, Sito and Kroyer] for additional dialogue. We didn't want to infringe on a brand that worked already."