The day has finally arrived for fans of Mordecai and Rigby, with the long-awaited spin-off series to Regular Show, aka Regular Show: The Lost Tapes, arriving on Cartoon Network. While the latest animated series is taking us back to the past to revisit the adventures of the park employees we hadn’t witnessed, there’s an overarching storyline that confirms this isn’t just a spin-off. The Lost Tapes is actually a sequel to Regular Show and its series finale, and by revisiting the events of the last episode, the latest release has brought back quite a few characters who didn’t make it in the original series.
Warning. If you have yet to watch Regular Show: The Lost Tapes’ first episode, be forewarned that we’ll be diving into spoiler territory. As a refresher, Regular Show’s original series finale featured Pops sacrificing his own life to defeat his evil brother, Anti-Pops. When we return with The Lost Tapes, Pops is in heaven, revealing that his nefarious sibling has changed his ways. In the opening moments, viewers see Pops having the time of his afterlife, doing whatever made him happiest in life. Not only do we see the likes of Pops, Anti-Pops, and their father, Mr. Maellard, but we see countless characters from the show’s past who didn’t make it out of Regular Show alive. With this unexpected series of events in its premiere, Regular Show: The Lost Tapes clearly has some big surprises ahead, and you can catch the opening below.
To break down this surprising storytelling style, Pops is shown in heaven as he inadvertently destroys the tape that he was using to watch the events of his life. Routinely revisiting the hilarious antics of Mordecai and Rigby has become a big part of his afterlife, and thus, losing the tape sends him into a spiral. Unable to find anyone who will give him a new tape or fix his old one, Pops undergoes a wild adventure with a deceased “frisbee golf player” and gets his hands on a series of tapes that are clearly meant to be the “Lost Tapes” of Regular Show.
While Beavis And Butthead doesn’t have that much in common with Regular Show, the way that the former’s revival worked might be a good way for The Lost Tapes to do the same. In the MTV animated revival, we see the titular teenagers in their “usual forms,” while also taking trips into the future to see what they look like as adults. Thanks to splitting its focus on different timelines, Cartoon Network viewers might have the chance to see Pops’ future storylines while examining the future lives of Mordecai, Rigby, and their other colorful cohorts. With over forty-episodes of the spin-off already confirmed by Cartoon Network, Regular Show is in it for the long haul.
What do you think of the wild twist that The Lost Tapes has unveiled? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!
