Happy Tree Friends creators Kenn Navarro (left) and Rhode Montijo

What kind of mind does it take to devise fresh, new ways of mutilating cute lil’ cartoon animals? An inventive one, naturally enough, and Kenn Navarro proves his resourcefulness with every episode of Happy Tree Friends. Created by Navarro and Rhode Montijo at Mondo Media, the animated series follows the colorful hijinks of its cast of cuddly critters—all of whom inevitably meet grisly ends. Previously, Happy Tree Friends was an internet- and DVD-only phenomenon, but now American citizens can view episodes on their cable-equipped TV sets courtesy of G4’s Attack of the Show. In this interview, Navarro reveals how such gruesomely good entertainment came to be.

What are the roots of Happy Tree Friends?

We started Mondo Media in 2000, around that time when the big internet dot-com bust happened. We were doing a whole bunch of internet shows, cartoons like God and Devil and Thugs on Film. We would have all sorts of different jobs that would come through and we were brainstorming for one of the jobs and we happened upon this idea of making like a really violent cartoon out of these really cute and cuddly characters that would meet these really gruesome demises. And for some reason, that just completely cracked us up. I don’t know why, and I still can’t explain to this day why, but it would just crack us up and we came up with a laundry list of all these scenarios, like putting them in a building on fire that all of a sudden burst into flames and somebody had to help. But even at that time, we didn’t even know that it was going to be that serious. We just thought it was one of those jokes. Out of every brainstorming, 40 percent of the stuff is unusable anyway. It was just stuff that would crack us up.

How did you pitch it to your company?

Later on when Mondo started looking for more content and more shows, it opened up the pitch to all of the creative people here, and Rhodie and I were looking at each other and thought “Hey, let’s dust off that idea. I think it just might be crazy enough to work.” So that’s what we did: We started from one sketch on a little piece of paper that Rhodie drew of a character who later became Shifty, and then up from that Rhodie had this great idea of drawing a poster that actually was of a rabbit, who later became known as Cuddles, and at the bottom it said “Resistance is Futile.” So we just stuck it up on our workstation where everyone could see it, so that in our thinking it would subconsciously influence people to think “You know, that show could work.” Eventually, we pitched the show internally and they liked it although they did not understand it at first, but they were like “Yeah, I think it could work.” So, we would get questions like, “So they die every episode but then they come back?” We were like, “Yeah, it’s brilliant. Don’t you get it?” “Okay…” So it was a little bit of a bump right there because it was so crazy. But eventually we got to do it and had a lot of fun just knocking all those ideas out and doing all this crazy, crazy stuff that we were able to get away with that you couldn’t get away with on TV or any other media aside from the internet, to this day even.

When did HTF actually launch?

Originally, it was going to be part of Sony’s supposedly big website POP.com which never popped I guess. Then there was another website that it was supposed to launch on, but that kind of stumbled, too. So eventually we were like, well, we'll just put it out on the Mondo site as part of the galaxy of shows that we had out there. So it went out and we high-fived each other and were like, “Wow, that was great.” And then the big dot-com burst happened and BOOM it was like a nuclear bomb went off and everything ceased production, everything stopped. And we were scratching our heads and saying “What are we going to do now?” So one of the shows that had this huge cult following happened to be Happy Tree Friends, and we had the idea to put out a DVD and see if all five people who love the show will buy it. So we put them together and made the DVD, and to our surprise it sold through and kept selling through, which prompted us to go, “Hey you know maybe we should do more of these little cartoons.”

What kind of reactions did you get from people who just happened upon this cartoon?

You can imagine from the content, we get the extremes. You get people who are like “Ahhh, that was great!” Part of the show, too, is that we try to catch people off guard, especially if you watch it for the first time. It’s really sweet and cute on the outside, and then you watch it and you’re like “Oh my gosh!” I think that is part of why the show works so much. We also get a lot of great hate mail, which I love to read. This crazy, crazy really vicious stuff. “Oh my god, how can you guys do this? It is completely wrong on all levels.” Stuff like that. We get the extremes of feedback which is great, I love reading all that stuff.

From start to finish, how long does it take to create one episode?

The actual production probably takes about two-three weeks, from once we have a locked concept, story boarding and scripting and doing assets and stuff like that. The brainstorming is a little more amorphous. Sometimes it’s easy—we will get a really funny episode like that, but sometimes it takes about two-three weeks to come up with a decent concept that we will just throw out the window anyway at the end of it. But I think we can turn around an episode within a month. Back in the early days when the shows were a minute long, we would bang the episodes out in a week, actually. So that was a pretty crazy schedule, but now it’s better. They are a little bit longer and we get more time to give it a little bit more love.