‘We Ordered a Sh*t Ton of Art Supplies and Made Ourselves Laugh’: Inside Adult Swim’s Puppet-Filled April Fool’s Day Stunt

Adult Swim SVP of Creative Jacob Escobedo spoke with IndieWire about the network's latest April Fool's Day stunt and his ongoing commitment to handmade art.

“The overall idea was there would be a progression, a kind of stepping down in quality of puppets over the course of the night,” Escobedo told IndieWire over Zoom after the surprise episodes aired. “So it kind of started off with a bang with these felted Muppet-style puppets for the first episode. The second was more of a sock puppet with live action characters, and the third was our handmade papier-mâché puppets that we hand-puppeted ourselves.”

“We sat in a room and ordered a shit ton of art supplies and sat in there for weeks and just made ourselves laugh,” he said. “What’s funny is, when we first set out to do it we were like ‘Everybody, you need to make really shitty puppets.’ And we have a lot of creative people who just couldn’t make shitty puppets. All the puppets turned out really incredibly, so our original concept of stepping down the quality of the puppets didn’t really take because the in-house team did such a good job.”