by Robert Strauss for The Inquirer [Philadelphia]

Red Bank, N.J.–It’s a rainy day, so Kevin Smith, whose long-delayed animated version of Clerks finally airs tonight, is doing some decorating at View Askew, his company headquarters.

“A little this way. No, maybe that way,” an assistant says to Smith, who is trying to get just the right angle on a huge framed poster for the French version of Dogma, his most recent movie. Smith grunts, and moves it into place. “Great. Looks great,” says the assistant.

That will make it about the 95th large framed poster covering the walls at View Askew, a warren of cluttered rooms just down the hall from a small brokerage and looming above a mundane parking lot on the second floor of a mini-office plaza. The boxy building screams “Central Jersey,” and that’s just how Smith likes it.

“New Jersey is where the movie business started, so I don’t feel like much of a pioneer. Had we been a fair-weather state, it would all still be right here,” says Smith. Then, breaking into a chuckle, he adds, “Can you imagine–a vast and empty New Jersey–just like L.A.? What a stretch.”

Smith spent a couple of months in California during the winter and came back with a vast and empty feeling. ABC had bought his idea for an animated version of his first cult-hit movie, Clerks. It seemed a rather daring move at the time.

Clerks, made for about $30,000, brought in a bigger return on investment than any other movie in 1994. It was the saga of the travails of a slackeresque convenience-store worker and his buddy, a video-store clerk, in the working-class Leonardo section of Middletown, a sprawling Central Jersey suburb. Its profane and frank dialogue–though it had no nudity or violence–attracted a large following among the young and the hip, but hardly appeared the stuff of network television.

All seemed marvelous at first. Smith says Disney CEO Michael Eisner himself green-lighted the project.

Clerks even got a commercial spot on ABC’s Super Bowl–which meant, essentially, that the network had given up several hundred-thousand-dollar’s worth of add time to give Clerks a promo.

David Mandel, coming off an executive-producing stint on Seinfeld, joined the staff. They made six episodes and waited for their slot.

And waited.

“So one day Scott [Mosier, Smith’s longtime film collaborator] calls and says there’s a story in Variety about the ABC spring schedule and we’re not on it,” says Smith, now ensconced in his seriously cluttered office behind one of the berry-colored IMACs that dot View Askew. “Mandel went ballistic.

“Me? I don’t know,” says Smith, shrugging his lumpy shoulders. “I guess I just don’t understand network executives.”

Clerks will finally get its run starting tonight at 9:30 after a Drew Carey repeat. The promise is that all six episodes will run consecutively. The reality is that Clerks has gone from Super Bowl promo to almost certain death.

“People at ABC said to me, ‘This is May. This is good,’” said Mandel by phone during a trip to New York. “But this is really June. May 31st is like saying the thing costs $1.99. It’s really $2 and this is June and this is the summer. I know Seinfeld and Millionaire started in the summer, but that’s a rationalization. Someone changed their minds, and I think it’s sad.”

An ABC spokeswoman said merely that the network was promoting Clerks and liked the series or it wouldn’t go on the air at all. If there is any solace for Smith and Mandel, is that all the other series ABC did start in the spring have died.

Clerks, the animated TV series, is actually a bit more irreverent than the film. Throughout the episodes there are equal-opportunity put-downs of women, lawyers, uppity black people, low-thinking white people, and even George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. There is some sly insertion of the gutter language typical of Smith’s films.

“But somehow they didn’t let us use ‘bong,’” says Smith. “I can’t believe that that hasn’t been mentioned sometime in, say, Dharma & Greg.”

There is also a disclaimer at the beginning of each episode, labeling the work fiction.

“They’re just being careful, I guess,” says Smith, eyebrow raised ever so slightly.

Smith and Mandel, in homage to The Simpson’s, persuaded a slew of celebrities to voice some Clerks characters. Gwyneth Paltrow is herself, as are basketball stars Charles Barkley, Grant Hill and Reggie Miller. Judge Reinhold is a judge named Judge Reinhold. Alec Baldwin is a mean rich guy named Leonardo Leonardo–”our own Mr. Burns,” says Smith, referring to Home Simpson’s wretched boss.

And the main characters from Clerks,the movie, are back as voices in the cartoon. Brian O’Halloran is Dante Hicks, the Quik Stop’s loyal clerk. Jeff Anderson reprises his role as Randal, the noodle-brained clerk at RST Video next door. Periodically coming in are Jay and Silent Bob, played in the movie and voiced in the cartoon by, respectively, Smith’s good buddy Jason Mewes and Smith himself.

“We’re back, yes, we’re all back,” says Smith, wrapped in a hooded sweatshirt and full beard, as Silent Bob is much of the time. Smith says that all of the original Clerks folk are involved in independent films–Anderson on the West Coast, and Mewes, O’Halloran and himself back in New Jersey.

New Jersey is where Smith intends to stay, too. In downtown Red Bank, about a mile from the office, is his beloved Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash, the comic and memorabilia store he owns with Mewes. There, in the store between Mamma Lucia’s Ristorante and the Duxiana bedding store, you can buy vintage Justice League of America comics, old Batman paraphernalia, a statuette of Underdog, or even a $10.95 copy of Clerks, the Comic Book, the inspiration for the TV series, written by Smith and illustrated by Jim Mahfood.

Smith’s next film, which he is writing now, will be the final one in his current Jersey series. Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy, and Dogma explore Smith’s New Jersey roots and, to an extent, his existential take on Catholicism.

And New Jersey is a distinct character in the animated Clerks. The Quik Stop is in Leonardo, just as in the movie, and there are Jersey-centric references to places such as Asbury Park and certain malls and ball teams.

“But, really, it’s just my mind-set, a Jersey mind-set, that pervades the shows,” Smith says.

Sitting across from his desk are three outsized plastic chairs that have Mickey Mouse legs and bodies, and in one case mouse ears. He isn’t yet thinking of removing them after his less-than-hoped-for relationship with Disney-owned ABC.

“If you are in New Jersey, you always have to keep your sense of irony,” he says.

Jonathan Storm, Television Critic jstorm@phillynews.com

Dude.

There’s this new cartoon starting tonight at 9:30 on ABC. It’s called Clerks, man, and it’s all about these slackers who have jobs at the video store and the Quik Stop. You can’t really say they work there, because they hardly ever do any work, see?

But that doesn’t mean the jobs are easy, man. You’ve got to know how to get the coffee out and where the Porky’s movies go and stuff.

Remember in English class when they told you that in really good books, the words themselves–like their sounds–sort of went along with the idea that the guy was writing about? OK, you don’t remember anything from English class because you were out smoking dope under the bleachers. But, anyway, they did say that.

And Clerks is just like that, man. See, it’s about these slackers, so the guys who draw it hardly do any work at all, so the pictures really rot. I know man. Nobody says rot. But it’s a newspaper.

So they’ve got these lousy pictures, but since they’re cool slackers, they make all these references to movies and TV and stuff. And, naturally, because they’re cool, they make fun of most of it. But you’d, like, have to spend your whole life in a video store or watching TV, man, to always know what they’re talking about. In one show, they do a whole riff on The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer.

So it’s sort of like Beavis & Butthead for geniuses.

Lots of times, they have pictures of actual celebrities. You know, basketball players like Charles Barkley or actors like Judge Reinhold or Katharine Hepburn. Of course, they show her head shaking a whole lot. And since they’re really cool, they even have movie directors, man, and who can tell them apart? I mean Tim Burton’s one thing, but who can even spell Martin Scorsese?

But here’s where it gets really funny. Judge Reinhold plays a judge, man.

Most of the time, they have people imitating the celebrity voices. The best one was when they had Gilbert Gottfried imitating Jerry Seinfeld. Gilbert Gottfried rocks.

Kevin Smith, the guy who made Clerks, made a move called Clerks once, and it was pretty good. And he made Chasing Amy and Dogma, and a lot of people liked them, too. So he’s all steamed at ABC for starting the show at such a strange time of year, when probably nobody will watch it.

He’s right. Nobody will watch. But he shouldn’t worry. All the desperate show-biz executives will still buy the guy’s stuff because they figure cool young guys like you and me, dude, will like it. Though maybe he should stick to movies.

It’s too hard to remember when anything’s on TV, man, except, like, The Daily Show. And even if they could remember, nobody cool would watch on ABC, anyway.

Dude, isn’t that the network with that quiz show?