NYCC 2015: ‘SuperMansion’ Press Interviews

One the biggest unknown new shows to New York Comic Con this year is Crackle’s stop-motion superhero comedy SuperMansion. And I use the term “biggest unknown” not as an oxymoron, but an accurate description of the series’ current status. Very few people have heard of the show, and even some of the press at the roundtable interviews hadn’t even watch all three episode (here, here, and here) released thus far, yet SuperMansion comes from the veteran minds of Robot Chicken producers Seth Green, Matt Senreich, Zeb Wells, and Tom Root, and stars Bryan Cranston and Keegan-Michael Key, in addition to the other stellar voice actors.

In fact, the SuperMansion panel was held in the Javits Center’s immensely spacious main stage, likely due to it’s huge potential, but barely managed to fill half the seats. Those in attendance, however, were treated with endless wisecracks courtesy of Cranston and Green, with some fantastic background and behind-the-scenes info from Wells and Root. The latter two (who also voice the characters of JewBot and Brad, respectively) took some time to chat with members of the press beforehand, and gave us a glimpse into where SuperMansion came from, and where they hope it is headed.

For those unaware, the show actually began as an Adult Swim pilot that never made it to fruition about two years ago. It finally got picked up by Crackle, which allowed the creators to make a few alterations. “We bumped it up to a 22-minute show, which allowed us to do B-stories and C-stories, and give each of the characters more,” Wells told BubbleBlabber. “That’s what attracted us to Crackle, is that they saw it as a 22-minute show, and wanted to do 13 episodes. With all the characters, it was a bit ambitious for 11 minutes. The show still might have worked, but it would have been just joke, joke, joke, joke, joke. We found that serializing it and having running plots for the characters worked really, really well.”

The lengthening totally makes sense (that’s what she said?), because SuperMansion is such a character-driven series. “If you watch the show, you’re going to find at least one or two, or maybe all the characters that you really connect to,” Wells explained. “It was really important for us to make characters that we fell in love with, and hopefully other people will like. I think there’s something to like for everybody.”

But with the identities being so unique, the writers have to make sure the jokes aren’t too one-dimensional or repetitive. “We quickly figured out that the superhero parody, the jokes the characters are based on, that’s going to be funny for one joke, maybe two, and absolutely not more than an episode,” Wells said. “These characters have to be funny. Their personalities have to be funny. They have to have funny wants and desires … or the show wasn’t going to last. I don’t want to be in episode three and still making jokes about where they’re going to get their capes washed today; it’s got to be character comedy first and foremost.”

Of course you can’t have good characters without good voice actors, and none come with more fanfare than the star, Bryan Cranston, due to both his recent launch into super-stardom, as well as his renowned acting ability – even when it comes to voice acting. “He’s got a great voice for it,” Wells said. “That’s one thing that all of our animators say, because the animators have to go in there, and they are the other actors. So it’s kind of a partnership between them and the voice actors, and I just had so many animators come up to me and say, ‘His voice is so much fun to animate to.’ A good voice actor is sort of directing the animation as they go, and Bryan has just done this for so long and takes it so seriously, that it’s finely tuned.”

“He just brings so much human emotion to the role, and he really made the role his own,” Root added. “So I don’t think Zeb or Matt had any problem getting great performances out of him. In fact, he would steer the character in directions they weren’t expecting. We’ve had a lot of great luck with SuperMansion casting, we get Jillian Bell and Chris Pine and Keegan-Michael Key, and they’re all so great that lines that we wrote in the script are all of a sudden much funnier than they deserve to be. Which is always a treat when you’re a writer.”

“I’m also proud of the unknowns that we have on the show,” Wells said. “The people playing Black Saturn [Tucker Gilmore] and Cooch [Heidi Gardner], I think they are super funny as well, and I’m excited for people to hear what they brought to the table.”

He uses the future tense not just because a lot of people haven’t watched the show yet, but also because there’s a major character that we haven’t even seen yet – and she’ll have quite an effect on the others. “Around episode six, Jillian shows up as Titanium Rex’s illegitimate daughter, and that’s a fun way for Rex to explore what it’s like to be a father, and what he’s done with his life,” Wells revealed.

This focus is placed on Titanium Rex for the most part both because he’s the star, and because he’s so different from the other characters. “You kind of want him to feel lost among the other characters – sort of the house of jackasses that we’ve put him in there with,” Wells said. “He should always feel like he can’t quite connect with them. And it’s kind of fun watching him interact with American Ranger [Key]; they’re from the same time, but American Ranger is still a 25-year-old from that time. So they have this history, but they’ve also gone completely different directions, and Rex has 70 years of life behind him.”

But the writers are aware that jokes about being old can only go so far, and aren’t sustainable long-term. “I think it’s still there under the surface [as the show progresses] but I think it did seem like there was so much more to do with the show, that it was maybe better to resolve that in a bigger way, and let that still be a small issue. So it does pop up every once in a while, but I think Rex has so much more to worry about once Lex (his daughter) shows up, and then the show just goes in some crazy directions. His relationship with American Ranger kind of comes to a forefront with the affair that he’s having with Ranger’s wife. That kind of becomes a bigger part of it.”

All this character development is something the guys didn’t get to experience with their previous work together on Robot Chicken, a show that has a countless number of skits and different roles in almost every one – but the shows are still cut from the same cloth. For starters, they both involve a tedious animation process. “There are 30 animation stages, and every animator averages between six and ten seconds every day,” Root said.

Also, the themes are similar. “I think we’ve been having a lot of fun on Robot Chicken for many seasons, taking fantastic characters and finding what’s funny about the reality of those characters,” Root said. “If those characters existed for real, what would be funny about their everyday lives. That’s one of our tropes on Robot Chicken that we go back to over and over, and we find that endlessly funny. So getting to do recurring characters – especially big, colorful, comic book characters – and applying the same sort of curiosity about their everyday lives, to us it’s endlessly funny. That’s what I love about this show – that comic books seem really simple at first, but there’s a never-ending supply of stuff to make fun of.”

Take Cooch, for instance. “We wanted to play with the sexy, Catwoman type-character, because it’s kind of bizarre that you’re meant to be attracted to these sexy characters, but if it was truly a cat, what would that mean? So I think Cooch is a much more complicated character than what the name probably suggests, and we don’t really make jokes about the name; that’s not really what was funny to me about the character.”

There are obviously some major differences between RC and SuperMansion too though – especially one in particular. “I think what’s cool and funny about Robot Chicken, is that as soon as a joke isn’t funny, the sketch is over. You just bail,” Wells said. “Maybe this joke is only funny for 10 seconds, maybe the joke’s funny for 30 seconds, but it’s never longer than it has to be. When we’re writing these shows, the scenes have to work, they have to advance the characters, and they also have to be funny. And if it’s not working, well, sorry dude, you have to make it work. Otherwise the show doesn’t work. And so definitely that was more challenging.”

The switch in networks is another notable change. By airing on Crackle instead of Adult Swim, it’s a whole different set of standards & practices, which could spell disaster if the new one is stricter. Fortunately, things turned out wonderfully. “I don’t know how it could have gone any better,” Wells said.  “You hear people complain about executives all the time, and I just have zero complaints. The notes that they would give us were actually good notes, I thought, and created good conversations. And then they were very deferential. If for some reason we just really believed in a joke or something, they’d say, ‘Hey, if you guys really believe in this, do it.’ They respected us and we respected them, and to work with people that legitimately got the show and loved the show…that counted for so much. I’m so glad that it ended up there. I hope we can work with them forever.”

Fans should hope so too. Getting renewed for a second season would allow the producers to delve even further into the backgrounds of the characters, and they have some very amusing ideas.

“We wanted to explore if Titanium Rex ever had a Clark Kent alter ego,” Wells explained. “Some writer had pitched his alter ego as Mel Germin, fashion photographer – but he had done it for like a month and got pissed off because he didn’t like being a fashion photographer. And he was super embarrassed about it, so he didn’t want to talk about it, and he killed this alter ego. So that’s something that in season two I’d like to revisit if we can make that work, because it seems pretty funny.”

“We want to try to find a nice, big arc for Titanium Rex, do a little more serialization, do some bigger character moments,” Wells continued. But the storylines won’t be limited to the show’s star. “A lot of villains ended up popping up toward the end of the season, so I want to keep checking in on these villains. In the show, whenever they capture a villain, they put them in the prison that’s under the mansion, so as the season goes, the amount of villains keeps getting higher and higher, and finally that becomes a problem. But it creates a nice, fun little community. So the supervillains almost become their own family down there, while the heroes are up there. I want to explore that a little more next season.”

In the meantime, be sure to check out the three episodes currently available online, and look for new ones every Thursday on Crackle.

[Photos by Becca Green]