Painterly fan art of Regular Show characters playing NES together in a living room

Regular Show

2010cartoon fandom / advice animalclassic

Published September 24, 2026

Regular Show is J.G. Quintel's Cartoon Network cartoon about slacker groundskeepers Mordecai and Rigby, which premiered September 6, 2010 and pulled 2.097 million viewers with its debut episode 'The Power'1. The show's mix of 1980s references, quotable dialogue and adult humor built a dedicated fandom that turned its characters into an advice animal macro series and a massive fan art catalog2.

cartoon network memes advice animals fan art memes tv show memes early 2010s memes

Overview

Regular Show follows Mordecai, a blue jay, and Rigby, a raccoon, two twenty-something groundskeepers at a park run by a gumball-machine boss named Benson2. Their side cast, an immortal yeti named Skips, the lollipop-headed Pops, Muscle Man and High-Five Ghost, gave the fandom a rotating cast of remixable faces long after the pilot aired2.

On the meme side, the show's biggest format is a Mordecai and Rigby advice animal macro that pastes the pair's heads over a pinwheel background, with top-text/bottom-text jokes riffing on their dialogue and voice quirks2. Fans also produced an extensive body of illustrated fan art built around ship pairings, screencap redraws and 1980s pastiche in the style the show itself pulls from2. Urban Dictionary entries turned the show's quotable lines into their own micro-currency, from Muscle Man's 'MY MOM' jokes to Mordecai's 'MAD MAN MORDO' rap3.

Origin & Background

Platform
Cartoon Network (source) / Meme Generator & Tumblr (fandom spread)
Creator
J.G. Quintel; meme macro creators unknown
Date
2010

The show grew out of J.G. Quintel's student work at the California Institute of the Arts, specifically the 2005 short 'The Naive Man from Lolliland' (source of Pops) and the 2006 short '2 in the AM PM' (source of the Mordecai and Rigby dynamic)2. After Quintel joined Cartoon Network Studios, he was invited to pitch for the network's Cartoonstitute incubator, and the pilot he built from those student films eventually became Regular Show2.

The series premiered on Cartoon Network on September 6, 2010 with the episode 'The Power,' which drew 2.097 million viewers on its first night1. The KYM entry, which mirrors the show's own history section, embeds the pilot's opening as the reference video for the meme fandom1.

How It Spread

The first season's positive reviews and 80s-flavored humor pulled in a fandom that quickly moved past passive watching into remix output1. By October 2012, the Meme Generator template pairing Mordecai and Rigby with a pinwheel background had racked up more than 910 user submissions, making it one of the show's most reused image macro formats2.

Off-site, the fandom kept its own hubs. A community wiki tracked characters and episodes, and the show's official Facebook page had passed 2 million likes by December 20122. Urban Dictionary users leaned into the quotable dialogue side of the fandom, writing multi-entry definitions that just list Muscle Man and Rigby's most-repeated lines as proof of the show's meme lexicon3.

The series was nominated for several awards during its run and picked up a Primetime Emmy in 2012 for the episode 'Eggscellent,' which the fandom then screencapped and remixed heavily2. The original pilot clip on YouTube stayed a common reference link for meme posts pointing back to where Mordecai and Rigby's chemistry started1.

Timeline

2005

J.G. Quintel releases the CalArts short 'The Naive Man from Lolliland,' introducing an early version of Pops.

2006

Quintel's follow-up short '2 in the AM PM' features prototype versions of Mordecai and Rigby.

2010-09-06

Regular Show premieres on Cartoon Network with 'The Power,' pulling 2.097 million viewers.

2012-08

Regular Show wins the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Short-Format Animated Program for 'Eggscellent.'

2012-10

Meme Generator's Mordecai and Rigby pinwheel advice animal template passes 910 submissions.

2012-12

The show's official Facebook page passes 2 million likes.

Frequently Asked Questions