'2 in the Am Pm' Timeline: from 2006 Indie Short to Iconic Franchise
By Robert Thorne
The origins of "2 in the AM PM" trace directly back to CalArts’ notoriously competitive Character Animation program. During Quintel’s final years at the institute, faculty members frequently subjected students to high-stress, sprint-based creative drills. One popular tradition involved a collaborative game where students wrote character designs, situations, and jokes onto folded strips of paper, threw them into a hat, and drew them at random to storyboard a coherent narrative under relentless deadlines.
Quintel partnered with fellow animator Sam Marin, who would eventually voice Benson, Pops, and Muscle Man in the broadcast series. The premise was deceptively simple: two retail clerks working an overnight graveyard shift at a sleepy mini-mart decide to consume what they believe are ordinary candies to stay awake. The candies turn out to be dosed with LSD. What followed was a startling departure from the polished Disney-adjacent aesthetic traditional animation schools favored at the time. Quintel leaned into loose, squiggly linework, observational dialogue, long silences, and sudden eruptions of surreal body horror.
When the short hit the independent festival circuit in late 2006, it gained rapid word-of-mouth traction among animation professionals. Indie animators shared digital rips across early video-sharing platforms and festival kiosks, recognizing an unmistakable voice. Quintel had captured the authentic, listless rhythm of twenty-somethings trapped in dead-end service jobs, an energy that mainstream American television had largely ignored in favor of hyperactive slapstick.
Robert Thorne covers electric vehicle innovations, autonomous driving systems, global mobility trends, and automotive engineering developments.
