Dick and Paula Celebrity Special was a Soup2Nuts

Soup2Nuts

Soup2Nuts is an American animation studio founded by Tom Snyder, Loren Bouchard, Brendon Small, Jody Snider, and Amanda Normoyle. It is known for its animated comedy series...

 animated series that aired on FX from 1999 to 2000.

The premise of the show was that Dick and Paula hosted a talk show where famous individuals, usually deceased, talked about their work or what made them widely known. Examples of such guests include Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin

Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...

, Marquis de Sade

Marquis de Sade

Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade was a French aristocrat, revolutionary politician, philosopher, and writer famous for his libertine sexuality and lifestyle...

, Oedipus Rex, and Lewis and Clark, among many others. Accompanying the two hosts was a Paul Shaffer

Paul Shaffer

Paul Allen Wood Shaffer, CM is a Canadian musician, actor, voice actor, author, comedian, and composer who has been David Letterman's sidekick since 1982.-Early years:...

-esque keyboard player. This premise bears similarities with that of Steve Allen

Steve Allen (comedian)

Stephen Valentine Patrick William "Steve" Allen was an American television personality, musician, composer, actor, comedian, and writer. Though he got his start in radio, Allen is best known for his television career. He first gained national attention as a guest host on Arthur Godfrey's Talent...

's Meeting of Minds.

The series, like Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist

Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist

Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist is an American animated series that originally ran on Comedy Central from May 28, 1995 to December 24, 1999,–with a final set of three shelved episodes airing in 2002–starring Jonathan Katz, Jon Benjamin, and Laura Silverman...

, the first season of Home Movies

Home Movies (TV series)

Home Movies is a dialogue-driven American animated series that originally aired from 1999 to 2004. The plot surrounds eight-year-old Brendon Small , who makes films with his friends Melissa Robbins and Jason Penopolis in his spare time...

, and Science Court

Science Court

Science Court, an edutainment animated series from Tom Snyder Productions, aired on ABC's One Saturday Morning from 1997 to 2002. It was the closing show to Disney's One Saturday Morning as it aired at 11:30 am/12:30 pm...

, was animated in Squigglevision

Squigglevision

Squigglevision is a patented method of computer animation in which the outlines of shapes are made to wiggle and undulate. Tom Snyder of Tom Snyder Productions invented the technique, which his animation studio Soup2Nuts subsequently popularized in several successful animated series.Compared with...

, a computer animation technique that caused the edges of people and important objects to vibrate constantly. Also like those series, Dick and Paula utilized retroscripting

Retroscripting

Retroscripting is a term for two techniques used in movie and television programs.-Plot outline:A retroscripted script contains a plot outline and leaves dialogue deliberately vague for interpretation by the actors through improvisation...

for much of the dialog, in that a basic outline is given and the actors improvise the dialog. Later, the dialog is edited to a coherent script.

FX didn't have a big success with Dick and Paula Celebrity Special, and thus the series was canceled after fewer than a dozen episodes.