Jason Blasta making merry at the local bar with The Guys (friends who exist soley in his imagination).

Alanis Blasta enjoying a drink, not noticing her daughter.

George Blasta preparing to prank someone from behind a tree on a dark night.

Coming someday

Show Summary

Precious Nothing was an adult animated comedy centered around a middle-class suburban family, taking heavy inspiration from The Simpsons, but with a style of comedy based more in absurdity and comedic sociopathy (our professor described it as “if The Simpsons had a baby with Seinfeld, realized they were in over their heads, and left the kid with Ren and Stimpy). A typical episode would be split between a loosely connected A-plot, featuring the trials of Jason and Alanis Blasta, the heads of the household, and B-plot, featuring their children George and Gina, as well as their dog Crunchy. The show would find itself with a comfortable niche on late night television in the mid-90s but would be taken off the air in early 2002 due to the increasingly controversial lengths it was willing to go through for the sake of a joke, and multiple lawsuits, the contents of which remain sealed. Due to the limited scope of the series and it’s home video releases, the rights to which remain in legal limbo, the series would ultimately become lost to the sands of time, with the few records of its existence remaining becoming hot commodities in the collectors market.

Barlaston (The Pilot)

The story of Precious Nothing begins with the Ebonridge Vanderbilt University class of 1988, when the original pilot was created as a collaborative thesis project between Manfred Carlson, Charlotte Crump, and Rudy Barlas under the name “Barlaston.” Assembling their individual talents after meeting in a theatre production of Hamlet, the three would spend their entire last semester of college completing this project, with Carlson handling animation, Barlas handling scripting and storyboarding, and Crump serving as editor and providing voicework.

At this stage, Precious Nothing functioned as a scathing parody of The Simpsons, at several points directly referencing well known gags, such as Jason strangling George in the same way Homer does Bart, only for Georges neck to break and for Jason to extract an exact copy of his son from a closet filled with Georges and for the plot to continue like nothing happened. The characters would also act significantly differently than they would in the final product, with Gina having more of the little devil tendencies that would become better associated with George, and Alanis’s position as voice of reason being exaggerated to paranoid extremes in parody of Marge Simpson.

Early production charater sheet of the Blasta family. Digitally restored from 1988 December issue of the EVU Gazzette.

After submitting Barlaston to their professors, the pilot would be shown at the university’s yearly thesis showcase, and allegedly received thunderous applause from much of the student body and much of the faculty, though the head of the animation department would backhandedly praise it as “the most fluidly animated, best voice acted aristocrats joke to ever permit someone graduation.” Upon graduating, the group would pursue their own careers and the story of Precious Nothing would end until 1994.

Submission

As a person who grew up watching classic Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry, Manfred Carlson was deeply enthralled by the work of Tex Avery and Chuck Jones, inspiring him to pursue animation and getting an original cartoon pilot serialized. Unfortunately, though his skill in animating expressive and dynamic movement was great, great animation was not enough to ensure a greenlight in the 90s. Times were changing, and writing and originality began to become a much larger metric on a cartoon’s success than its animation, and Carlson simply wasn’t creative enough to make the cut. Time and time again, he would draft pilots based on the shows of his childhood, only to be rejected because for all the work he put into them: they were done before. He was reaching the end of his rope both mentally and financially, barely scraping by on freelance work for various small studios and ad agencies when finally, he would find a copy of the old college pilot and send it to the Roschmann Broadcasting Network in what was alleged to be “a bitter, drunken fit of frustration.”

His tenacity would be rewarded one week later when he would receive a call from RBN producer Harold Berry telling him the pilot was greenlit by the network.