Exclusive Interview with Mike Salcedo, creator of the YouTube show “The Stockholms”

 

A masked man walks into a bank where he proceeds to hold a lonely employee and two children at gun point. Due to an incompetent police force, the hostage situation which evolves from this robbery lasts so long that the people inside the bank slowly turn into a makeshift family. We’ve seen it before, and yet we haven’t, and yet we have. As original as it is entertaining, The Stockholms packs more punch into its three-minute episodes than some animated sitcoms can in half an hour. Over the course of this exclusive interview, showrunner Mike Salcedo reveals what it takes to find a good premise and what comes next when you do. 

Tim: The premise may be a bit complicated, but you use the intro to explain it to the viewers. Most shows use that trope for dramatic effect, like Avatar: The Last Airbender. But you use it for comedic effect. The only other animated show I know that does that Justin Roiland’s House of Cosbys.

Mike: That was exactly our inspiration for the intro. 

Tim: Were there any other shows that served as a big inspiration for you?

Mike: It’s over twenty years old now, but have you ever seen a show called Zombie College? It was a flash show on a platform called Icebox. It was made by Eric Kaplan and John Rice. It was also kind of high concept: a college full of zombies. But it was smartly-written and the episodes are exactly the same length as ours. That’s what we had to figure out: how do you tell a satisfying story over the course of ten three-minute episodes? 

Tim: What was Jasper’s life like before he decided to become a bank robber?

Mike: I’ve been having a lot of late night talks with Connor Murphy, who is another writer on the show, and we kind of accidentally figured out the next few seasons. Jasper’s path is a big thing we’re trying to iron out. There’s a lot of interesting directions we could take, but we got one that we came up with this which I think can be really funny. We reveal a tiny element of his past life in the finale, but we’d like to develop everyone’s history in greater detail moving forward. 

Tim: At the end of the first episode, Jasper takes the pizza guy hostage. At the end of the second episode, the cops give him Chris Pine as a prom date for his fake daughter. Is he also going to stay inside the bank moving forward?

Mike: Yeah. 

Tim: Will this be a repeating formula where, at the end of every episode, Jasper takes another hostage and the ‘family’ inside the bank keeps growing? 

Mike: We might have a couple more. It doesn’t get to the point where the building’s filled to the brim, but we got some coming. 

Tim: I’m imagining a Too Many Cooks scenario where the show will end up having so many characters that the intro song is going to last forever. 

Mike: We actually cut back quite a few characters in the interest of like budget and stuff. We had a character named Vince, who was always climbing around in the vents trying to escape, and we never saw him. And then there was sort of a grandpa character who you see in the trailer – Santa Clause kind of co-opted that role. We had another idea for a character who would be the only one to take the hostage situation seriously, and that became the pizza guy in the end. We melded a lot of different hostages into a few. 

Tim: Why did you decide to cut some of the characters that you ended up cutting?

Mike: We didn’t really have time for everyone to be explored. And we didn’t have time for everyone to really say anything. There were some characters that were just there for the concept of what their character was, but they didn’t really play a part in any of the themes of the episode. The thing about the current season is – every character has their own episode, so to speak. 

Tim: So where did the idea for the premise come from, then? 

Mike: I do a web comic outside of work called Bigfoot Justice. It’s where I put all my ideas that are too weird to make into a short film. I had the idea for just the premise of – what happens when a hostage situation is played so right, it never ends, escalates or de-escalates. It was way too big an idea to turn into a four-panel thing, and there wasn’t really a punch line to it. When I was approached for pitches I had that one lying around, so I pitched it. 

Tim: As far as Stockholms and Cyanide & Happiness go, you guys come across as one big, inexhaustible ideas-machine. When you sit down to brain storm with each other, do you have any tactics, methods or rituals that help boost creativity? 

Mike: We talk a lot about finding more official ways to do it. We typically sit around and talk, have a conversation and then something will spin off into a character, fixate on a part of the news, and sooner or later it becomes an organic idea. My favorite ideas always come out of conversation, especially when we are not trying to come up with something. 

Tim: Of all the animated shows I’ve seen, the funniest of them all come from YouTube. As an independent creator, the platform seems to be an increasingly favorable alternative to working with a network or channel. Of course, it’s harder to get noticed online because there’s so much content being uploaded every day. What was it like starting Explosm, and what trials and tribulations did the team face on the road to amassing an audience? 

Mike: It was those four guys, online, talking to each other and deciding to make comics and such. They were very open about letting people share their comics freely on MySpace and other social media. When they started doing the channel – I believe it was around 2008 when they started making the shorts – I joined the team in 2013. Being consistent and over-saturating the channel with content. You know, to say to yourself: we’re gonna upload videos every week, not whenever we feel like it. Another thing that worked out in their favor were the compilations. People like watching twenty or so shorts at once. 

Tim: That bit about the compilations, I can relate to that. I’ve found myself hanging out with friends, having nothing to do, and putting on YouTube. You instinctively go for the longer videos – 20, 30 minutes – because you get into a mood where you don’t want to stop. 

Mike: Right, and yet that’s precisely the issue with animation on YouTube. You can’t just make a thirty-minute video out of the blue. That would take forever. But if you make them in tiny fragments, one at a time, you can eventually combine them together into bigger videos. 

Tim: Is that what you are planning to do with Stockholms as well? 

Mike: For sure. We’re figuring out how to best clump them together. I think it takes about 45 minutes to watch the whole show. We’re looking to just upload a big chunk of it one day to people can watch it that way. 

Tim: With the pandemic, a lot of people are saying that since live-action film productions are going to be a long way off, they’re expecting studios and networks to become much more keen on making animated content as it’s easier to produce from home. I wouldn’t be all that surprised if after a while, someone executive contacts you and says: I want Stockholms. If it could air anywhere, where would you want it to air? 

Mike: Adult Swim just picked up Michael Cusack’s YOLO: Crystal Fantasy. Those are new-ground, flash animators, and if that’s the direction that AS is going down I think we might be able to slip in there as well. It’s a similar look, similar humor. The humor of Stockholms is also pretty mild. I mean, if there wasn’t some guy holding a gun to people’s heads it seems like it could almost be a Cartoon Network team.  

Tim: There are a ton of animated shows out there on YouTube which haven’t been discovered yet or aren’t receiving quite the attention they deserve. If you could give a shout-out to any program out there, which would it be? 

Mike: Starship Goldfish. I know that guy was trying to put together his pilot for a long time and he finally did. Definitely check that out. 

Watch The Stockholms on Explosm’s Youtube channel. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.