Conception and Development
Joe Murray, creator of Rocko's Modern Life, partially based Heffer on an adopted friend who enjoyed bologna sandwiches and "had an interesting take on life." Heffer first appeared on an ID spot aired on MTV in 1989; the ID spot depicts Heffer as flying out of a television with the MTV logo branded on his buttocks.
Murray originally wrote "Sucker for the Suck-O-Matic" as the pilot episode; the executives decided that Heffer would be "a little too weird for test audiences." Murray, instead of removing Heffer from "Sucker for the Suck-O-Matic," decided to write "Trash-O-Madness," an episode without Heffer, as the pilot episode. Originally, Murray did not include any information about Heffer's origins in his pitch to Nickelodeon. Vince Calandra wrote the Heffer's origin plotline in Season 1.
Murray auditioned Tom Kenny in a large casting call in Los Angeles and chose him as the voice actor for Heffer. Kenny based Heffer's voice on the voice of a nephew of his; at the time the nephew was a teenager. The boy, who was 13 when the Heffer voice started, was the son of Kenny's brother. Kenny said that the voice was "ot dead on, but some of his quirks I incorporated into the Heffer audition."
Jeff "Swampy" Marsh, a storyboard writer, says that Heffer's right eye and left nostril are "notched at the bottom" due to Murray's design style. Marsh added that the animators found keeping the sides straight "a little tricky at first" and that they referred to the design as "Tombstone-shaped."
Read more about this topic: Heffer Wolfe
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