The Original Plan for Over the Garden Wall Could Have Changed the Show’s Future Entirely

Over the Garden Wall should be mandatory viewing in the fall. Once the leaves turn from green to orange, everyone should be watching Patrick McHale’s unsettling slice of turn-of-the-century Americana, complete with vintage folk music and haunting characters. The complete series of 10 episodes could have been very different if the original pilot for the show was picked up as-is, retaining many of the elements its fans love about it while shifting it in a very different direction. What if Greg and Wirt weren’t trying to get home and their journey took them down a darker path?

McHale’s original pilot for the show reflected something familiar but ultimately distinct, and sent our heroes on a quest that would have taken far more than a single season to resolve. They say it’s good not to overstay your welcome and to leave when you’re on top, but Over the Garden Wall is one of those shows that many wish went just a little bit longer. It’s storyline always had a fixed endpoint, but if McHale’s vision from his pitch was approved, we could have had a saga similar to Adventure Time in both breadth and drama.

Over the Garden Wall’s Pilot Sets The Tone For The Full Series

After graduating CalArts in 2006, McHale made his first pitch to Carton Network with an animated short called Tome of the Unknown. It wouldn’t be several years later after he proved to have a successful track record from working on The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack and Adventure Time that the execs gave his idea a chance in 2011. The pilot toured several film festivals around the country, earning accolades and generating a great deal of buzz that made it for the network to keep ignoring this unusual yet charming concept.

Tome of the Unknown: Harvest Melody was posted on YouTube in 2015, one year after the full series had aired on Cartoon Network. The pilot seemed practically identical compared to the show that aired that prior November, with Greg, Wirt and Beatrice getting into their typical shenanigans with weird quirky characters that feel like they came out of a 19th century storybook. However, major details were subtlety changed that completely affect the direction of the tale and could have altered the course of the series as a whole.

Instead of working on a solution to get back to their world, the trio are in search of pages for the Tome of the Unknown, a mysterious book that we don’t learn much about in this short. It’s importance is made very clear, although it doesn’t feel like much of a priority thanks to Wirt’s ability to find mischief. Even by episode’s end, we are reminded about this book yet clues remain obscured about its purpose and power. It might be more mysterious than the vegetable car that Greg drives in the episode or whether or not John Crops has internal organs, but it’s true intentions can be found in McHale’s original pitch material that positioned the series to be something very different and much longer.

Over the Garden Wall Could Have Gone In A Very Different Direction

McHale’s original idea for Tome of the Unknown followed Greg and Wirt through the same folksy landscape as Over the Garden Wall, but their endgoal was more peculiar. After making a deal with a devil, Gregory and Walter are tasked with piecing together a book of forgotten tales by finding its scattered pages across the Land of the In-Between. It wasn’t renamed The Unknown until after McHale’s first pitch was rejected, which saw the series go through additional retooling before shaping up into the fully green-lit pilot. This “story land” helps Over the Garden Wall make more sense from the beginning, but it also removes much of the enigmatic qualities that drew fans to fall in love with the series.

Tome of the Unknown went through many different versions, and with that came an array of lengths. McHale hoped for a three-season run with that first pitch, then aimed for a 90-minute movie when that didn’t pan out. After the success of the pilot, 18 episodes became the desired number but that was chopped down to 10 due to budget and timing constraints. That’s where the story picks up back in our contemporary times, but the question remains: What would a three-season long series of Over the Garden Wall have looked like?

One thing we can glean from Tome of the Unknown is the episodic feel of the short, which has the characters trying to track down this MacGuffin but not really trying that hard to find it. They certainly would find many pages along the way, but how many hundreds or even thousands would they need to complete this enchanted book? With a herculean task like that, it seems like Greg and Wirt’s endeavor could have lasted far more than three seasons and perhaps never even have a fixed end point. The impact of the series is in part thanks to the completeness and compact nature of it, but an extended narrative like this could have given fans many more opportunities to explore The Unknown and spend more time in this bizarrely whimsical world.

Are you a fan of Over the Garden Wall and think it ended too soon? Let us know in the comments how you feel about the series, and what you would have liked to see with more episodes.

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