My Name is Earl has won as many awards-Emmys, a DGA Award and a People’s Choice Award-as the karmic debts that Earl has racked up in his misspent youth. The sitcom is wildly popular, with a loopy humor with a barely visible message peeking out from behind the antics.

The perfect formula added another feature this season with an episode, airing November 16, involving a few minutes of stop-motion animation. The animation is the brainchild of Earl creator/executive producer Greg Garcia who had a yen to try to mix in stop-motion clay animation to the already non-stop comedic brew.

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“Last year we were talking about how cool it would be if we could somehow get some clay animation in the show, to see our characters and their world in that form,” explains Garcia.

A cool idea turned into reality with an episode that would provide the right impetus for adding clay animation. In it, Randy and Earl go off the grid to live in nature, and Randy decides to taste a salve made from roots and berries, despite a warning not to. When the hallucinations start, his POV is pure stop-motion animation.

“We started the season knowing we wanted to do animation,” says executive producer Marc Buckland, who directed this episode. “That gave us a jump on getting the puppets made and getting everything else we’d need in place.”

Garcia says that they gave themselves about two months to allow for creating and incorporating the animated sequences. “We shot our normal episode and when we got to the pieces that we knew were going to be in clay animation, we shot it the way we’d like it to look with the puppets, so the animators had a framework in terms of how we wanted to see the shots,” Garcia says. “We’re seeing through Randy’s POV, so it’ll always be one camera.” He also had to be very careful about the shots that led into and out of the animated sequences, so the transition wouldn’t be jarring to viewers. “You had to set up the audience with the shots so they’ll know we’re about to go into his point of view,” says Garcia.

To produce the animated sequences, Garcia and Buckland found Jargon Entertainment, a Burbank-based media company that specialized in full service post production, 24 frame playback and graphics. Jargon Entertainment vice president Sean Buck set up the animator’s space, under black cloth, on the ground floor of their offices, located in the warehouse of U.S. Lighting and Grip. The 12-inch puppets were constructed by Rob Ronning, who was a moldmaker on “Nightmare Before Xmas,” and a character fabrication supervisor on the TV show “The PJs.”

Under the black tent, animators Joe Mello, Chris Finnegan, Tennessee Reid Norton, and Martin Jimenez did the painstaking work of bringing the mini-Earl, Randy, Catalina and Joy to life, one tiny movement at a time, making sure that they matched the live-action template in every detail. Each doll-sized character included a set of removable mouths, to enable the animator to place the proper lip position for the dialogue. Crucial to integrating the puppet sequences with the live action, director of photography Jim Matlosz made certain that the lighting exactly matched that found in the live-action template.

Buckland, who says he’s worked with animals and children but never puppets, went into the episode without misgivings, because of the careful planning-and an innately optimistic point of view. “I’m basically a moron, so no matter what anyone says, I jump into it with enthusiasm and optimism and then let myself get thrown against the jagged rocks.”

The “jagged rocks” of directing this episode were, in fact, fairly gentle. Buckland reports that the live-action template ended up being a great way to work. “The biggest challenge for me was knowing as a director what I wanted the puppets to be doing in specific scenes,” he says. “I could tell my actors to do and see it right away. With animation, it’s not like you can see a take of it and say, hey, that’s not quite right. It takes a long time to do each 5-second set.”

To resolve that potential problem, he says, he and the animators quickly developed a good way of communicating the end result. “We got smart quickly,” says Buckland. “The animators would show us a couple of stills of expressions and camera angles and ask if that was what we had in mind. We’d say, we want it tighter, can his moustache wiggle here. There was that kind of communication before they set out to animate it.”

“These animators are very meticulous,” he adds. “You have to have a lot of patience.”

For nearly everyone involved in the My Name is Earl episode, a chance to work with animation was a thrill. “This project for Jargon was a lot of fun and a dream come true,” says Buck. “Growing up on Davey and Goliath and Gumby, stop motion has always been an art form that I truly respected, and when we got the chance we jumped on it.”

“Growing up, I loved the Muppets and as an adult, I love the Pixar animated films,” adds Buckland. “Honestly, I thought it would be fun to do animation.”

Now that he’s on the other side of the episode, Buckland proclaims that he expected the experience to be more difficult. “I expected to have to settle more,” he says. “But I’m really pleased with it. It makes me laugh and I think the audience will too when they see it-especially not expecting to see animation.”

With such a successful entrà©e into stop-motion animation, will My Name is Earl venture back into this territory? “I would say it’s unlikely we’ll do more animation, because we’ve done the joke now,” says Buckland. “But Greg always comes in with out-there ideas. So you never know.”

And Greg? “I don’t know,” he says. “It’s a lot of fun and I love how it turned out. We’ll see how people respond to it.”