welcome!

The month was April 2011. I was a 9-year-old in 3rd grade riddled with stress and anxiety due to my autism, and I was being ostracized by my peers due to it. Piled on top of my struggles was the worst tornado season I've experienced in my entire life. When the school day was done, my safe havens were The Sims 3 and Cartoon Network. I would go on my mom's black Windows Vista laptop and watch episodes of CN shows on the website.

And it was on a fateful Friday that April when I'd just got done with one of the worst school days of my life and saw that there was a brand new show featured on the website. This show was called The Amazing World of Gumball and it was not like any other show I've seen on Cartoon Network.

Upon viewing the first clip they had on the site - a scene from The Quest - I was initally put off by the look. The show featured live-action backgrounds with 2D Flash animated characters on top of them. The clip also featured a 3D-animated dinosaur. The show wasn't grabbing me at first, but it was when I started watching the other clips available that I started to fall in love.

The thing that ended up selling me was this promo. Seeing all the wacky shenanigans that this blue cat and his siblings were going to get into intrigued me. I highly anticipated that date - Monday, May 9th, 2011. But wait - I ended up getting the show earlier than anticipated as a sneak preview aired after The Looney Tunes Show's debut on May 3rd! The show ended up being everything I've ever wanted and more. It was absolutely hilarious and the blending of different animation mediums made the show look stunning. And...the rest is history!

My first true fandom experiences were had with this show; back in 2011-13 I would lurk and discuss TAWOG on the Cartoon Network Fan Talk forums for hours, while creating my own episode ideas and drawing piles of fanart. In fact, I loved a fanfic written by user Amazing Buffy Potato so much that I copied it onto pieces of paper. And no, I didn't print it - I wrote it physically. I'm pretty sure I still have it around somewhere. They didn't finish the fanfic, and I wrote my own 8th chapter. And also - I replaced their self-insert character with my OWN self-insert Mary Sue character. Being 9 was the best.

I didn't learn the show was British and that it had a full opening theme until October 2011 when my dad gave me his old iPhone 3G to have. And that might've ended up being his biggest mistake as a parent as that was my first step into becoming even more involved in fandoms and turning into the chronically online person I am today. I watched Gumball YouTube poops and YTPMVs all the time, and I especially rewatched the OG Gumball YTP collab by pacmancherries which is unfortuately lost to the sands of time.

As the years went by, TAWOG remained my favorite cartoon and I made so many great memories with it. I watched as the show began developing into the insanely beautiful, satirical masterpiece we know today. Even after we lost cable in 2014, I used my grandmother's cable login to watch TAWOG's season 3 premiere on cellular data while we had a power outage.

However, my hyperfixation began to wane around mid-late 2014 as 12-year-old me began heading onto greener pastures to pursue a special interest in The Caddicarus Show - another British surreal comedy show that premiered in May in the early 2010s (but wasn't using the "world of" naming convention yet when I found it!).

But even then? I still visited TAWOG at least once a year whenever Caddicarus was on break, up until 2019 when the original run ended. Wenever I needed a good pick-me-up, TAWOG was always there. It's been several years since I've truly hyperfixated on the show, but I do want to rewatch it soon.

Simply put, I would not be where I am today if it wasn't for The Amazing World of Gumball. Not only was it - along with Zimmer Twins - my introduction into the world of fandom and broader internet culture, but it was also what kickstarted my special interest in animation and media in general, and my desire to research the history of all my favorite shows and networks. I began to actually watch CN religiously when it dropped, showing up for every Monday and Tuesday night premiere block. Basically every special interest I've had since Gumball has built on top of it - Caddicarus was another British surreal comedy, Onward was an urban fantasy story about two brothers (TAWOG heavily focused on two brothers!), and Smiling Friends is basically TAWOG on Adult Swim.

Gumball stood out in the already diverse range of cartoons during CN's Renaissance era. It represents the uniqueness and creativity that Cartoon Network used to stand for pre-Discovery merger. As we wait for the show's return, we can only hope that it can still muster that sense of creativity it had during its peak. When so many interesting shows are being moved to Adult Swim and Cartoon Network gets left hanging, the latter needs a bit of spice. And TAWOG may be the last hope.