oldsidelinghill:

SPOILERS BELOW!

THOSE WHO HAVEN’T WATCHED THE FULL SERIES SHOULD STOP READING!

I think we talked about every possible ending imaginable. I recall being on the phone with either Amalia or Tom (maybe both) and just… like… listing out ending after ending after ending. And even after we figured out what seemed like the best solution… it kept changing as we changed little bits and pieces during the boarding process.

Early on we had Wirt and Greg getting lost on Halloween night in episode 1 (rather than a flashback in episode 9).  And at that point… in episode 10, we actually had Wirt and Greg get home during Christmas time. So when they got home no one in town had seen Wirt and Greg for MONTHS and it’s never explained. It could have been cool, but seemed too overwhelming conceptually with all the other stuff going on in the final episode.

Another ending was… to leave Wirt in the Unknown and only Greg gets back. But… it just seemed cruel and uncomfortable to split them up in the end – plus it didn’t really show Wirt’s full arc of learning to accept his responsibility of being a brother. 

Early on Wirt and Greg actually got lost in the Unknown by RIDING the little black train (rather than almost getting hit by it). That was actually the whole concept of the series – that Wirt and Greg get on a train on Halloween night, and realize it’s going to “Death” and so they jump off half-way and end up somewhere between life/death/dreams/reality.  So in the last episode we reveal that the beast is actually not a bad guy… he’s just trying to get them on the train, because that’s where they belong. Wirt and Greg realize they can either accept their fate and get on the train… or they can wander the woods and become old and crazy like the woodsman. they decide to accept their fate, and they get on the train and head off into the darkness…. We think they died. But then reveal that the train was never going to “Death” at all…. the scary place the train was going to was actually “Life”!  All along Wirt was subconsciously fighting the will to survive.  because… confronting your problems in life, for him, was more frightening than death.  I still like parts of this, but… when it comes to characters accepting their own death… it gets tricky to write it for a kids cartoon. it was also just hard to get the train concept to work without it feeling convenient and overly magical. plus a lot of people brought up similarities to Harry Potter and Spirited Away and Polar Express which turned me off the idea too.

I think i’m writing too much.  I’ll stop here.