Behind The Scenes: Ryan North on Writing New Bravest Warriors Episode, Robochris

Posted on November 4, 2013November 4, 2013 by Vic Bright

In the second episode of Bravest Warriors Danny invents a robotic version of Chris, that’s gotta turn out fine yeah? Hhmmmm….

Bravest Warriors gets back into random humour mode after last episode’s nail biting brain scrambler. In this installment Danny invents a robotic version of Chris that appears to be 110% better at being Chris than Chris could ever be. Will the real Chris get jelly of his best friends new invention, and why did Danny feel he had to invent him in the first place? You’ll have to watch and find out!

Robochris was written by Dinosaur Comics’ Ryan North who talked us through the writing process on his tumblr:

“It started when Breehn (wonderful guy, cool showrunner dude) asked if I had any ideas for an episode, I said yeah, let me send you some pitches! And he said sure, let me send you some unaired episodes! (This is the best part of working on anything you’re already a fan of: getting to see stuff like this).

So I watched the episodes and then sent in Breehn my ideas. These were short, one-paragraph things that basically say “here’s what a story could look like”. There were three, one of which was this:

Danny has built a Backup Robot Chris so if Chris dies the robot can take over, but RoboChris 5000 is way better at being Chris than Chris is: better jokes, a 10% wider smile, and fully in control of his emotional life! Chris is jealous of how the robot’s taking over his life (and of how smoothly it can have long conversations about feelings with Beth), so he uses Danny’s lab and leftover parts to build robot clones of the Danny, Wallow, and Beth. The new Bravest Robots talk about their feelings with each other so effectively that they decide to all merge into a single being of pure energy and explore the universe, and Danny’s mad because that was like three months of work and cool electronic junk that Chris wasted.

I talked with Breehn a few days later and he pointed out that the ending was really close Ultra Wankershim. Which, you know, is fair! We talked about different ways the story could go. Here’s some of my notes from that call, with notes I made on those notes just now in bold:

emotional reason for building the robot – something about the friendship, misses his friend. [this is what set the course for the episode]
Drawing on each other when you’re friends / head getting the wrong idea drawing a big realistic nose and mustache on her face[Breehn and I remembered the cool girls drawing on each other’s arms in high school]
Chris head wakes up danny to say “when i hug you today i instantly knew something was off” in the middle of the night. Super drama.[haha, yes, the ol’ “super drama” note one leaves for oneself]
Danny’s 17th birthday, everyone forgot, so he makes a robot: chris head. He hasn’t been this angry since last year at this exact time. [I like it when my notes have jokes I can use later, that makes writing easy!]
little robots makes a robot, little robots all the way down [this is how the world was made??]
gigantic beth made by robot?? [???!?!!]

“The screenplay itself went through five drafts in a week of back-and-forth (a pretty intense week, but lots of fun!) and at that point in this collaborative writing process was done! Over the next several months the episode came together: actors recorded lines, props got drawn, Breehn punched up some jokes that I’d still get the credit for because nobody would know, and so on! Every once in a while I’d get sent some cool things like RoboChris’s design, a few stills from the animation, the background music – all really exciting. And then I got to watch it yesterday with all of you!”

About the ending: “Breehn and I talked about the story, we agreed that Danny since was actually kind of being a big creeper here, maybe he deserves some punishment. Maybe he doesn’t get a happy ending after all, you know? Maybe RoboChris gets it instead. I started writing the screenplay, and that was the ending we went with:”