Tears were shed both on screen and in the audience as the credits rolled on the last-ever episode of Cartoon Network’s “Regular Show.”

The animated series, about a blue jay named Mordecai and raccoon named Rigby who works as groundskeepers at a local park, premiered on the network in 2010 and came to a close at a special screening of the final few episodes Thursday night at the AMC Burbank 16 theater.

While fans who packed out the theater laughed and cried at their heroes’ final adventure, the show creator J. G. Quintel sat in the back with a large group of the crew, waiting anxiously to see how people would react. After the screening, Quintel, who also voices Mordecai, came to the front for a final farewell Q&A along with William Salyers, the voice of Rigby; Minty Lewis, a storyboard artist and voice of a Mole named Eileen; and Curtis Lelash, SVP of original series at Cartoon Network, and one of the first champions of the show.

After eight seasons and 250 episodes, Quintel and the rest of the panel were understandably emotional about letting the series go. At one point Lewis commented, “This feels like a funeral right now.”

“It was neat to get to hear people react to the show one last time, because that’s not gonna happen anymore,” Quintel said to a chorus of sad ‘awws’ from the audience.

Quintel explained that since animation is made in “an assembly line fashion,” it was sad to see his colleagues, many of whom had worked on the show since its inception, slowly leaving and moving on to other projects.

“It was six amazing years of my life, it was never not fun to go to work, and you can’t say that about a lot of jobs,” Salyers said.

(Pictured: William Salyers, J. G. Quintel and Minty Lewis)