by Rollin Bishop

It's hard to place exactly when I first became aware of Cas van de Pol's work, but somewhere around five years feels about right. That's about when I started religiously watching the animated recaps Cas and crew would make; The Lion King recap is a stone-cold classic, but the uncensored Madagascar recap is where it's at. (Fair warning before you watch that one.)

But, more importantly than previous works, it was announced at the end of March that Cas has been hard at work on two very different projects: an animated pilot called Gnome Show and a video game, BOMMY.

"I love gnomes," says Cas in the announcement video. "They're silly, they're chill, they live in the forest. I love the rural and cozy aesthetics. I love The Wind in the Willows, I love Fantastic Mr. Fox. I love gnomes!"

BOMMY is… kind of the opposite. You play as bunnies who throw bombs at each other, with chaotic multiplayer matches where you can blow up the stage but also build. Think Fortnite meets Bomberman meets Worms.

The second half of the announcement video gets really real about the logistics of YouTube and view-based ad revenue in 2026. Cas's whole explanation is worth a watch, but the short version is: the team has done so many recaps for so long that the ones with wide appeal have a) been done or b) are about properties of less interest to Cas, and that interest is a big part of where the magic of previous recaps has come from.

And so, Gnome Show. Relying on an original project's success rather than the whims of the greater commercial industry producing art worth recapping is, it would appear, far more preferable. The pilot's out now, and you can watch it for yourself:

While the pilot retains the same sort of design ethos of the recaps — blocky, angular character designs with Flash-style snappy animation — it's a bit like someone asked Craig McCracken to do a, well, gnome show with Castle Crashers aesthetics. Cas indicates in the announcement video that there's likely to be some kind of serial narrative over time with dark fantasy elements, but the pilot is more concerned with being charming as hell and introducing the main cast.

Look, nothing more I can say here would serve you better than watching the Gnome Show pilot episode with your eyes and listening to it with your ears, but in case it moves the needle: there's fun music, Zach Hadel of Smiling Friends fame voices a gnome city contractor, there's more than one instance where the animation zooms in on something disgustingly detailed, and, well, it's just altogether charming.

I'd like for there to be more, so, watch Gnome Show.

/out of frame

🕵️ Rollin: The Scooby-Doo anime is real and it's coming to Tubi. I'm very excited for Yokoso Scooby-Doo!, even if I do prefer the previous name of Go-Go Mystery Machine more. Generally, I'm just… pro more Scooby-Doo, for that matter.

⚔️ Kambole: There's a pretty strong animation presence at Cannes Film Festival, operating as a sort of preview to the work-in-progress on show at Annecy – meaning sometimes you get things like the announcement that Keanu Reeves is now voicing the lead character in the stop motion film Hidari. The pilot for Hidari is outstanding, so I hope Reeves's involvement with the feature gets the project the support it deserves.