We talk to Sean Szeles about his new series “Long Live the Royals” and “Regular Show”

John Blabber: How did you come up with the concept for Long Live the Royals?

Sean Szeles: They were taking pitches for a shorts program. I pinned a couple of ideas I came up with and then I worked on some of those ideas some more. For Long Live the Royals,  I drew on my own experience with my family because growing up I watched a ton of British TV and loved that style of show. Specifically, my mom watched a lot of that style of TV, so I’ve always had an early brush with British culture with programs like Are You Being Served?  and Fawlty Towers, shows dealing with class issues all the time.  I thought it would be cool to follow the day to day life of a  royal family that rules over a kingdom in a modern setting. I pitched the idea to Cartoon Network and they really liked it. So I made the short and everyone seemed to like it a lot so the network wanted more  we came up with a mini-series that would suit the Thanksgiving Holiday.

John Blabber: On how his own family inspired the characters of Long Live the Royals.

Sean Szeles: My dad is kinda super goofy like King Rufus but he was also really strict. My mom is more into raggin’ into my dad whenever he does something wrong which leads to a lot of arguments and bickering. I had two older sisters that were super cool, and they introduced me to new music all the while they brought home their punk-rock boyfriends. Then my younger brother was kind of a brat, but we were friends that hung out a lot.

John Blabber: On who Sean picked to voice the principal cast:

Sean Szeles:

Rufus is voiced by Jon Daly and I’ve always been a big fan of his sketch work and would hear a ton of his characters on radio shows like Comedy Bang Bang!

Eleanor is voiced by Wendi McLendon-Covey and I’ve been a big fan of hers since Reno 911. We had other people that auditioned that played Eleanor more straight, but she is naturally funny with anything she says. She brought so much life to that character naturally.

Rosalind is voiced by Gillian Jacobs and I was a huge fan of hers on Community. She’s able to play a cool girl with bunch of teenage angst.

Peter is voiced by Kieran Culkin and I ended up flying out to NY to direct him for his sessions. He hadn’t done a lot of animated work, but he’s super funny and I’m a fan of his independent film work and we had a blast recording.

Alex is voiced by Nicki Rapp who is an up and coming voice actor that blew everyone away with her rotten-bratty kid voice. Once we had the main cast in place, we were able to write to the actors and what they would do.

The world we were building was expanding a lot so we started to employ additional characters voiced by so many comedy legends like Fred Armisen, Ellie Kemper, Ken Marino, Alfred Molina, Horatio Sanz, and Peter Serafinowicz.

John Blabber: On the concept of developing Long Live the Royals as a mini-series that takes place during a festival:

Sean Szeles: From the get go, Long Live the Royals was always intended to be four episodes that would air around Thanksgiving, so we came up with an idea about the festival. I didn’t want one long episode, but I still wanted the episodes to tie together. Every episode will focus on one particular character.

John Blabber: On mashing up a modern day world with a Medieval flavor:

Sean Szeles: I love old-timey things and it’s fun to set it in the past but it’s just easier to make the series with current tech like cell phones and tablets. It’s a non-specific time period and world and some people would be like “This doesn’t make sense!”, and some people are hung up on it, but we came up with a made up world that everyone can relate to.

John Blabber: On how Regular Show the Movie came to be:

Sean Szeles: We had no inclination of doing a movie in the early days. We just wanted to get it off the ground and do this season by season. After five seasons we started doing more half-hour specials where we were able to tell longer stories. We had a lot of fun doing those, and the studio talked to JG Quintel about doing a 44-minute long episode, and he proposed a full length movie. That’s how it started and then we came up with a bunch of ideas. We actually worked on the concept for a couple years at the same time as the show which is really hard to do. At first, we had a whole different idea first, threw it out, and then we came up with the time travel idea. We eventually came up with a two and a half hour movie of which we started tearing down, but then we wrote a screenplay and boarded everything that ended up being an exhausting process. This was the first movie we’ve ever done, and we think it turned out pretty well.

John Blabber: On how Regular Show the Movie was able to effortlessly plug-into episodes of Regular Show Season Seven airing right now:

Sean Szeles: We were working on the show at the same time as writing the movie. The concept of Rigby not graduating high school was something we referenced a little bit, but we kinda knew we could work with that for the movie. At the same time as we were writing the movie, we were putting together Regular Show Season Seven, which was really hard to do both at the same time. Because we were coming up with the plot of Regular Show the Movie which involves Rigby going back to school, the new episodes for Season Seven started incorporating this further and exploring Rigby going back to high school to graduate. The movie is canonical to the series now but if you knew nothing about the show, we wanted to make sure we made a cool movie that would entice people just by the trailer. We didn’t want to just count on the people who were fans of the show, but if you have been watching there’s some extra treats for you.

John Blabber: On what Sean is working on at the moment for the future:

Sean Szeles: I want to take a little vacation. My brain is kinda fried, but Ill let you know.

Regular Show has new episodes every night this week on Cartoon Network through Thursday @ 7:30 pm ET/PT, followed by Long Live the Royals @ 7:45 pm ET/PT, check your local listings.