"Food Adventures" wasn't always "Food Adventures". (Believe it or not, it had a title that was even more lame.) At the tender age of eight, I created a little cartoon called "Snack & Food Savers", or SFS for short. It featured a large assortment of fruits, vegetables, snack foods, and talking cans whose names always ended in "y". There was Bready, Piney, Aply, Oniony and many more. And the entire concept was a shameless ripoff of Disney's "Chip 'N Dale Rescue Rangers" which was on TV at the time. I mean, the foods went around rescuing people, they flew a makeshift plane, Strawberry wore a pair of "Gadget" goggles, and the characters all lived inside a giant statue of a T-Rex which was indirectly lifted from an episode of that series. (I sure was a hack in those days, wasn't I?) To make things worse, Aply often sported a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle bandanna over his eyes.

But the characters were in place. Even in those early days, Bread was the leader, Piney was Bread's love interest, Onion was cranky, Apple was goofy, and so on. Even the villains, Fat, Oil and Cholesterol were there. The characters popped up in my artwork all the time, but sadly, most of it is long gone. After a while, the "Snack & Food Savers" disappeared. But I never forgot about the idea or the characters. From time to time, I would doodle them on the back of my classroom assignments. And in 1999, the real comeback occurred.

I was in my English class with nothing to do, and I didn't feel like drawing any "Bad Atom" comic strips that day. So I dug deep into the recesses of my mind and pulled out those food characters from so long ago. I drew the entire roster of characters (at least the ones I could remember), and quickly renamed the cartoon "Food Adventures". My teacher, Mrs. Washeck, liked the drawings and encouraged me to do something with those characters. And I did.

At the time that I was getting seriously into my "Bad Atom" and "Squeek & Ribbit" TV series ideas (sometime in 2001), I brought "Food Adventures" back as a short-lived comic strip. I created a separate website for it, and the idea was that you would read the comic and submit a punchline for it. The idea didn't go far, and I moved on to other things.

In 2003, I began drawing a series of weekly "Food Adventures" comic strips. At this point, I had picked my main cast of characters. I whittled the 30+ characters down to a reasonable 8. I then redesigned the characters as I drew the comics. You can see really see the difference from comic #1 to comic #41. I also kept the villains around, and created a backstory to explain why these foods could talk.

But for some reason I was never completely happy with the comic strips. Not that I thought they were bad, I just didn't think they were the best representation of the "Food Adventures" concept. The one-panel gags were becoming increasingly difficult to come up with, so I began writing short film ideas. I thought perhaps I could turn these ideas into Flash animations, but my limited Flash skills quickly put a stop to that idea.

As I was creating the ideas for the short animations, I started to realize that I could do much more with the "Food Adventures" concept and characters. That's when I decided to do something unprecedented - I was going to write a movie.

"Food Adventures: The Movie" was written purely for fun. It was the easiest writing project I had ever undertaken. Usually when I start on a big project, I get sidetracked and it either takes me forever to finish it ("Fourth Grade Nightmare") or I don't finish it at all (my science-fiction novel). But this was a case where I simply wanted to see if I could do it, and I did. Over a period of three weeks in February 2004, I scribbled notes and ideas at work, wrote the outline, and typed up the 106-page script. (I timed myself - it added up to 72 hours of actual typing.) The script is now the centerpiece of my "Food Adventures" presentation.

Now that I have a complete concept bible, outlines for several short films, a movie script (and a sequel outline!), and a continuing series of comic strips, the outlook is good for an idea that started almost fourteen years ago.