Welcome back to the Steven Universe podcast. I'm Mackenzie Outwood and today we're continuing

our discussion about Reunited with creator Rebecca Sugar and former executive producer

Ian Jones-Corty. They're both sitting here with me and I'm going to jump right in because

we have got a lot to talk about. So from the beginning, what makes you guys want to kick

off this episode with the song?

Yeah, the song was a really late edition early on. The episode was going to open with Stephen

banging on a vending machine trying to get it trying to get the bag of chips out of

the bag of chaps out of it. We're just supposed to set up the diamonds eventually doing the

same thing to the earth to try and get the cluster out of it. But we were sort of looking

at the episode and how much we just had to reintroduce in order for it to make any sort of sense

and we knew we needed something big and uplifting and we wanted to know where Stephen's head

was at. I mean, the thing about the show always being from Stephen's point of view and

the thing about incorporating singing and dancing is that when a character is going

through something really nuanced, we like to do it through music because you can get so

much more of a sense of what that feeling is. And so being able to contrast the sort of

melancholy complexity of his feelings about everything he's learned with his like manic

need for some sort of positivity really lent itself to a song like this.

Also this this episode in particular was such a long time in the making. I remember talking

about the arm wrestling stuff like so early, basically, basically when we were on the cluster,

yeah, we were like, Oh, how is this going to end? It's like, well, it's going to have a fake

out. Then it'll come back and actually be a friend. Arm ship arm, ship arm wrestling the cluster

was a really early. Yeah, really early. That's why we had to see those arm ships like super early.

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