Last night during the Tromanimation Film Festival, Maxwell Atoms screened for the first time his 1995 student film that inspired the series

The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy .

The short, which preceded the Cartoon Network series by eight years, is called Billy and Mandy in Trepanation of the Skull and You. Following the screening, Atoms posted it online:

Atoms (who then used his birth name, Adam Burton) made the film when he was a 21-year-old junior at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. “The directive was to make a two minute animation, and that’s what I did,” Atoms wrote on his Youtube page. “I was big into fringe culture at the time, and found trepanning fascinating. I also wanted to do something with this ‘Billy’ character I was obsessed with, and I HAD to have some dinosaurs.”