Rebecca Sugar explains Steven Universe movie's origins in first clip from documentary

Here we are in the future and it’s bright… because Steven Universe The Movie is getting a documentary, which arrives on the animated feature’s forthcoming home release. In EW’s exclusive first clip from this behind-the-scenes look, series creator Rebecca Sugar unpacks the completely relatable experience that led to the formulation of this musical story.

It all goes back to September 2015 in the midst of the show’s second season. “We were headed to Japan and I had to change my phone and at a certain point it said, ‘Do you want to restore your phone?'” Sugar recalls in the video, shown above. “And I read that and I go, ‘Oh, it’s going to restore all my data to my phone.'”

That didn’t happen. “I hit restore and completely wiped everything from my phone,” she continues. “I had all of these drawings and photos from the crew from these really formative times that were just gone in an instant. I completely broke down. I had never felt like that before, to have years of my life just vanish and I never got it back. The movie comes from that experience because I started to think about, what would happen if these characters were restored to factory settings and all their progress got wiped?”

In Steven Universe The Movie, two years have passed since the events of season 5. It’s a time when the galaxy is at peace — and Steven is old enough to have a neck! But, there’s at least one more being left to fight. Spinel, a Gem scorned by Pink Diamond in the past and looking to exact revenge on her progeny in the present, arrives in Beach City and uses her weapon to reset all the Gems, wiping their memories and reverting them back to their early states.

“The whole point of Steven Universe is that these characters are making progress; that they’re having these long, interesting character arcs; that they’re going from being Gems that are programmed to behave a certain way to really finding themselves,” Sugar muses. “In order to break the show, we had to break that theme, and that’s what the movie does.”

The full documentary comes home when Steven Universe The Movie, which first premiered on Cartoon Network in September, arrives on DVD this Nov. 12. Target customers can purchase earlier on Nov. 5.

The hourlong special dives deep into the development of the movie with Sugar, though there are a number of other goodies to enjoy. One other is a “Crewuniverse” piece, which goes inside the room as Sugar pitches Act III of the movie.

Correction: An earlier version of this article stated Steven Universe The Movie would arrive on both DVD and Blu-ray. It will just arrive on DVD.

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