Rebecca Sugar named a Cartoon Network hero after her little brother
Steven Universe is loosely based on Steven Sugar, younger brother of creator Rebecca Sugar, who also worked on the show as a background designer. Her gentle cartoon about a half-alien boy became the first animated series to win a GLAAD Media Award and featured the first same-sex wedding in children's animation.
Sugar was a storyboard artist on Adventure Time in 2011 when a Cartoon Network executive, Curtis Lelash, asked staff for new show ideas. Hers grew out of a short story about a sensitive child helping teenagers with problems they could not put into words. She kept asking her brother whether naming the show after him was wise and only stopped once it was commissioned; he trusted her with it. When the series was greenlit she left Adventure Time, and no non-binary creator had independently made a show for the network before her.
Steven lives in Beach City with the Crystal Gems, Garnet, Amethyst and Pearl: ageless, genderless alien warriors who project female forms from gemstones at their core. He inherited his own gem from his mother, Rose Quartz, the group's former leader, along with the power of fusion, in which Gems merge into new and stronger personalities. The Crystal Gems turn out to be fugitives from an interstellar empire that once planned to wipe out life on Earth to incubate new Gems, and the later seasons pile on revelations about who Steven's mother really was.
The production was driven by storyboards, with board artists drawing scenes, writing dialogue and shaping plots. Beach City drew on Delaware beaches and Sugar's childhood, blended with anime, video games and art history, and Steven Sugar sweated over details down to the interior layout of buildings. Supervising director Ian Jones-Quartey added stars to the logo as a flexible symbol, then admitted he overused them. South Korean studios handled the animation, and the music of Aivi and Surasshu became central to the show's character.
A pilot appeared in May 2013, and five seasons ran from that November to January 2019, followed by a film and the epilogue Steven Universe Future. Critics praised its handling of identity, relationships and mental health; Garnet herself is a fusion representing a same-sex relationship. In 2019 it won both a GLAAD award and a Peabody, and the BBC placed it 99th among the greatest television series of this century.
Source: Steven Universe
