There’s a fan favorite running gag in Teen Titan Go! about Robin’s “baby hands,” but it wasn’t always intended to be about his hands.
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The producers of Teen Titan Go! say that the joke was originally about Robin’s legs.
“It started off in the script as he has skinny legs,” producer Michael Jelenic tells ComicBook.com. “He was embarrassed of his skinny legs.”
He and fellow producer Pete Michail say they changed the joke because it was hard to reveal skinny legs when the character already wears tights. When they noticed how small Robin’s hands are in his character design, they had found their new target and have run with that ever since.
“It’s honestly just something that makes us laugh,” Michail says. “I mean come one, he’s got baby hands?”
Robin’s voice actor Scott Menville noted that the writers of Teen Titans Go! frequently take real life in-jokes and insert them into episodes.
“These crazy writers will put in stuff from real life, stuff that they’ll hear us talking about when mics aren’t rolling,” Menville says, “or Michael’s dad makes an appearance. His actual, real life dad makes an appearance in our 200th episode. His dad’s an awesome character in real life. These guys will take all kinds of inside jokes from real life and throw them in.”
Menville says he’s always happy when a fan references the joke in real life or otherwise shows their support for the show.
“It’s a blast to show up and see there was a whole family that showed up and was sitting at the front of our panel that was cosplaying our different characters and to see some of the other people cosplaying,” he says. “And yeah, to hear people come up and referencing because I forgot all about the baby hands…but it struck a chord with a lot of fans.”
Jokes about small hands have made their way into a lot of late night monologues recently, but Jelenic points out that their gag came first.
“And by the way, we had baby hands before Donald Trump had baby hands.” he says.
Teen Titans Go! airs on Cartoon Network.
