| abstract | - Mark "Thurop" Van Orman is the creator of The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack and has also been a storyboard artist on other cartoons, most notably the Cartoon Network Emmy award-winning show The Powerpuff Girls and Camp Lazlo. Thurop has become well known for being extremely nice to his fans, often conversing with them on his Myspace and 'favoriting' fanart, updating his journal and gallery with information on the show and occasionally filling fans in on fun stuff happening in his personal life on deviantArt As a child, Thurop Van Orman spent three years living near a bayou, where he was forbidden to socialize with a local fisherman. Disobeying his parents, Van Orman would visit the fisherman, who would tell tales of the sea. When he was 13, his family moved to Utah, but he was able to convince his parents to allow him to go back to Panama City Beach, Florida and stay with some family friends. During this time, Van Orman found a boat, and took it out in the middle of the night. Eventually getting lost, it took him three days to finally return. He was saddened by his apparent failure as an adventurer. But when he related these stories to his friends, they were more entertained by all the things that went wrong (the misadventures) than what went right. After trying to live in the jungles of Mexico and eating out of dumpsters, Van Orman just chalked all these bad circumstances up as "part of the adventure". Van Orman was also fascinated by Dairy Queen commercials, which depicts landscapes made of ice-cream. He wanted to explore those fantasy lands, not so much to eat the ice-cream, but just for sheer exploration, and based the design for Candied Island on these commercials He is the voice of Flapjack in the series. The role was originally supposed to be played by Paul Reubens (Pee Wee Herman)[1] but he didn't show up on the first day of recording.
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