By Sean Moeller

If Modest Mouse lead singer Isaac Brock had his druthers, the fourth season of the Adult Swim cartoon “Home Movies”—out this week on DVD—would not be its swan song, the last flickering of Coach John McGuirk denigrating his P.E. students or Brendon Small getting all self-aware and weirded out for the trillionth time.

His allegiance to the modest animation program that lasted five years on UPN for five episodes, Canada’s YTV for a year and a half and the Cartoon Network for three years is strong to quite strong. It’s strong enough that he had his hand shooting for the “Good News For People Who Love Bad News” purse strings when he heard that the show was going to end back in the spring of 2004.

“He asked me very seriously if it was possible for him to finance new episodes,” show co-creator/writer/voice Brendon Small (yes, he’s a real person; a real person who loves his heavy metal at that) said last week from his Los Angeles home. “He actually really wanted to. He was very serious.

“Maybe I’ll write him his own personal episode.”

The truth of the matter is that “Home Movies” will never ride again, except in syndication. It is finished and now all we have left are these DVDs to play in our homes, appropriately enough. Small, who met Brock through his former Boston roommate of two years—comedian Eugene Mirman, said that he won’t ever make another episode of “Home Movies” no matter home much Brock tries to cajole him, as that show has passed. At the forefront for him is a new franchise called “Metalocalypse” (though it will always be “Death Clock” to Small), set to air on Adult Swim the first week in August and currently in different stages of development for 12 of the ordered first season episodes.

“A lot of murder happens,” Small said of “Metalocolypse,” a trailor of which can be seen at YouTube and warns, “We will make everything METAL.” “It’s not going to have the sweetness that ‘Home Movies’ had. It’s replaced that sweetness with violence and murder.”

Brock and members of The Shins contribute commentary tracks behind the upcoming fourth season’s bonus buttons. But it’s the show itself, about the pie-in-the-sky cinematic visions of Small and best friends Jason and Melissa and the awkward ways they socialize with other (supposedly) 8-year-old kids, that is so fetching. Graduated beyond its squigglevision animation, “Home Movies” emphasizes those strained moments when two people just aren’t made for communicating with each other. It’s either inappropriate timing or they’re two incompatibles, lost out on ever connecting. No elementary school teacher – not even gym teachers!—should be soliciting advice from a pupil. No elementary school teacher should be best friends with a pupil or seem to be standing on intellectually even ground with a pupil. It happens with the gruff McGuirk – a child, really, and the funniest whistle-wielding guy on television – and Small, who tries to always be the master of his world, but more often than not comes up short of really accomplishing that.

“I was 23 when I first started doing ‘Home Movies’ (in 1999),” Small said. “It was this very low-key, conversational cartoon and UPN just told us to do what we wanted. It came out and it got abominable ratings, but it turns out that those ratings, on cable, are really great. So, we just kept opening up the world. It is incredibly personal to me and to all the other people who work on the show. The way the characters grew up – that wasn’t the way I grew up. None of the people who work on the show had parents who had divorced. But there are things that happen in my life that I definitely use in the show. During the fourth season, I broke up with a girl and decided to start working out. Brendon tries to break up with a friend. I also got a new dog and I couldn’t believe how torn I was between hating and liking this animal – he’s turned into a very good buy, by the way—but I wrote that into the show. I have to have some kind of connection with the material. I can’t write about football because I don’t know anything about it.

“The only thing is, I didn’t watch a lot of cartoons when I was growing up. I still don’t. I don’t watch ‘The Simpsons’ every night, even though it’s a really great show. I don’t watch much of the Adult Swim stuff either. I don’t want to know what the others are doing. I look to Albert Brooks, the Marx Brothers and Woody Allen for my inspiration.”

The characters in the show struggle with themselves and the way they want to approach life, against the direction that the unbearable forces in their lives want to take them. Most are torn between growing up and busting free from their frights and staying cocooned right where they are, where it’s comparably safe and warm.

“They’re all weird, conflicted characters because I think people are equal parts smart and stupid. It was just a simple formula that we stuck with. The kids kind of spoke in a socially advanced way, but they didn’t act in a socially advanced way,” said Small, a 31-year-old native of Springfield, Ill. “Brendon takes himself very seriously and I took myself very seriously when I was a kid too. I think the stakes are a lot higher when you’re younger. You don’t know how to not sweat the small stuff yet. Homework was a big fucking deal. You just don’t have the tools yet to not be so self-aware and to know that a lot of shit doesn’t make a difference. It doesn’t make a difference if you don’t do your homework.

“I lived in a fantasy world as a kid and it was fun. I was a very quiet kid. If you spoke to me, I would have turned all red and I would have been embarrassed.”

McGuirk is meant to look and sound rough, said Small, but the character’s inability to be anything by dreadfully honest is essentially what allows him to not come across as the bully that could have always been possible. He could have been a caricature combo of Momma from “Throw Momma from the Train,” the older brother from “Malcolm in the Middle” and a form of Sam Kinison, without as much shouting, but he becomes the lovable loser.

“He hates his mother. He can’t be in a relationship with a woman and he can never have sex,” Small said. “We wanted to make sure that he never got laid. Comically, it’s never funny when somebody gets laid. You’re never proud of your buddy when he gets laid, but you do laugh at him when he doesn’t.”

Small feels that “Metalocalypse” will be the perfect vehicle for his new creative endeavors. The death and violence alone is cause for celebration, but the music fiend in him is really what’s being fed with his Spinal Tap-ish band of knuckleheads. He went to school as a musician at Berklee College of Music in Boston, but quickly found out that it wasn’t for him. He wasn’t able to let his metal chops glow.

“When you start playing guitar, you learn some Sabbath and then some Iron Maiden stuff. You start with Sabbath because it’s not as hard. My favorite bands are not metal bands, but metal’s dramatic and silly and grandiose. Its strong logic to the aggression is always kind of cool too. This was a time (during his days at Berklee) when people were embarrassed to play their guitars and you don’t really play metal at music schools anyway. I found I had little passion for being classically trained,” said Small, who soon started doing stand-up comedy at local clubs. “I bombed as much as I could. One night – and it happened to be a good night, one out-of-17 was a good one – I met (co-writer) Loren Bouchard and he asked me, basically, if I wanted to do voices for a program he was working on.”

The idea for “Home Movies” came shortly after the two began working together and even with the show’s success, Small said he doesn’t really get that close to it as he measures success by thinking about “The Godfather” and realizing that he’s not there yet. But he’s working on his new show with Metallica, King Diamond and Mark Hamill so that should count for something.

“I was spoiled rotten with ‘Home Movies,’” Small said. “But TV’s just a big temp job. You never know when the pregnant lady’s going to come back.”

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