Sarah Schmidt puts old ghosts to rest with new ‘Gassy’s Gas ‘N Stuff’ short

Sarah Schmidt’s Adult Swim series “Gassy’s Gas ‘N Stuff” has its roots in the years the animator worked at a small-town Ohio gas station owned by her family – a formative experience to which she frequently found herself returning after moving to the more stereotypically big city confines of Chicago.

“It was cool to see this range of people coming through with their different vibes, where especially now I feel isolated from that community,” the Ohio expat and CCAD grad said in a late October interview. “And a lot of the reason I like making these shorts and writing in this world is because I think a lot of people who are in those communities in America feel left out of the picture. There are so many cartoons about the big city, and there aren’t a lot of realistic ones about what the rest of the country is like.”

Of course, the term “realistic” is somewhat relative, with Schmidt constructing an animated world populated by anthropomorphic chickens, dogs, and cats who find themselves navigating the types of situations familiar to anyone who’s worked in customer service. (In one of the shorts, for instance, a new employee stays late to clean out the storage cooler.)

In creating the series, Schmidt said there were particular aspects of her early work experience that she wanted to capture, including the idea that the titular service station existed as an outpost that could only be reached by car. “I want it to feel like it [sits] off these long, questionable roads,” said Schmidt, whose series will premiere a spooky-season appropriate episode, dubbed “The Ghost,” via Adult Swim Smalls on Friday, Oct. 31. “So far with these shorts, we haven’t seen outside of the parking lot, so who’s to say how far away it is. And I like that it’s a little bit ambiguous, because it makes it easier for people who are from different types of backgrounds to project on it and be like, ‘Oh, yeah. I go to a gas station,’ or ‘I go to a bodega.’ … To me, the weirdest Americana crossover you can find is a space like this, and I was excited to explore that in a cartoon.”

Schmidt also acknowledged that these kinds of spaces are rapidly dying out, with mom-and-pop gas stations giving way to the proliferation of massive commercial chains. So, while her family still owns its property, the animator is aware that her shorts might serve as a means to preserve her memories of the place before it is eventually “scraped from the Earth,” as she explained it. “I’m not responsible for [the station] at the moment, but … it’s a thing I could be responsible for in the future, deciding whether to continue with it or to move on,” she said.

The majority of the characters in “Gassy’s Gas ‘N Stuff” are also molded on the people with whom the animator has crossed paths, most notably the boss cat, who Schmidt described as having traits adopted from her parents. These include the relative quickness with which Schmidt said her mom could correct customers who stepped out of line, as well as an ability the two share in relating well to a variety of people, her dad having forged his conversational skills in pool halls and in the break room at his former factory job, and her mom possessing an inherent warmth developed growing up in a large family.

“In the presence of my dad, I think people would be a little more averse to stepping out of line, because he’s kind of a big dude and you don’t want to push the wrong buttons when you’ve got a big dude in the room,” Schmidt said, and laughed. “But my mom, she knew exactly what to say when she’d had enough of someone’s bullshit.”

For the Halloween episode, Schmidt sourced her own work experience – longtime employees claimed the gas station was haunted, pointing as one example to the time they said the receipt paper extending from the cash register floated in the air – as well as those of the series’ voice actors. Jer Hunter, who voices the boss cat, once worked at a Florida Waffle House where pots and pans would spontaneously fall off their hooks on the wall. And Mo Doron, who voices Carla the Chicken, told Schmidt of the time they clerked at a Chicago record store where the vibe shifted considerably in the hours after the sun went down. 

“And it was always like, ‘Okay, we close at 10 p.m. and you should just leave then … because it’ll get spooky, generally,’” said Schmidt, who included details from these various accounts in the short, including Doron’s recollection of tying trash bags tight at the end of the night only to turn around and see that they had been loosened. “I’m excited to see if anybody in the comments … will be on there sharing their weird stories from the jobs they’ve worked. That’s kind of my goal with this, I guess, getting people on there sharing their weird stories from their weird jobs.”

For her part, Schmidt said she never experienced anything overtly spooky while on the clock, and she expressed a belief that the relative isolation required of the job naturally lent itself to fits of imagination. Still, she embraced the creation of the episode as one means of making peace with whatever spirits might have been lingering within the rural Ohio gas station. “If something did really happen there and there was something unresolved spiritually,” she said, “I like to think there’s something to be said for making a little story in homage to it and letting that ghost go to rest.”