Justice, Eucalyptus and Family – Koala Man’s Creator and Executive Producers On Season One of the Animated Superhero Satire

Hulu is becoming more and more of a trusted home for cutting edge adult animation between original series like Solar Opposites, The Paloni Show, and the upcoming Futurama revival, which puts Michael Cusack’s Koala Man in very good company. Michael Cusack has been a talent to watch lately and Koala Man doesn’t just continue his consistent run of content between YOLO: Crystal Fantasy and Smiling Friends, but it’s actually a revival of an older property that is very dear to Cusack’s heart. 

Koala Man remains faithful to Cusack’s Australian roots and surreal sense of humor, but it also beautifully subverts pop culture’s current obsession with superheroes. Koala Man is a strong distillation of Cusack’s passions that arrives at the perfect time where its commentary has never been more relevant. Michael Cusack, as well as writers and executive producers Benji Samit and Dan Hernandez, open up on the first season’s storytelling, how Springfield and Twin Peaks are influences on Dapto, and the unique, authentic Australian iconography that Koala Man celebrates. 

Daniel Kurland: Michael, Koala Man is a property that you previously played around with in 2015 for Australian television. Why was this a character that you wanted to revive? 

Michael Cusack: So I came up with Koala Man a few years ago and it was just him–he didn’t have a family or anything. When I was coming to LA and pitching shows, I thought it wouldn’t just be funny to do an Australian animated sitcom in the style of The Simpsons, but that if the dad character was spun off into something else beyond the “dumb dad” archetype. I thought that had just been done so much. I already had this Koala Man character and so I thought it would be funny if the dad was also this superhero, without any superpowers, that simultaneously tries to maintain a family on top of everything else. It was just a matter of merging ideas and playing around. It felt like a unique twist to it all.

DK: Well on that note, Koala Man also incorporates your Damo and Darren shorts and kind of becomes its own connected universe. Has it been a fun dynamic to explore and might more of your previously created characters crossover into Koala Man?

MC: Yeah, the idea was to make Dapto very much its own character. I grew up loving shows like The Simpsons and South Park. These types of TV shows where there’s as much of a world that you’re invested in as there are entertaining characters. A common theme in all of those shows is that they’re collaborative efforts–you’ve got showrunners, writers’ rooms, executive notes from the network and so much more. As satisfying as it is to make solo art where you have a vision, put it together, and then it’s done, I also love the idea of taking on a huge collaborative effort of this nature. I thought it would be an interesting challenge to work with a bunch of creative and talented people to make something special. 

DK: On the topic of your previous series like YOLO and Smiling Friends, have those experiences with past writers’ rooms changed how you break stories in something like Koala Man. Has your approach to writing been any different?

MC: That’s a tough one…

DK: It feels like you have more of an actual writers’ room for this show than you have in the past.

MC: Yeah, there’s definitely more of a writers’ room here and it’s run by Dan and Benji, who are the showrunners. I’ve definitely learned a lot from YOLO and Smiling Friends that’s probably subconsciously helped with this. But then again, I don’t know if that’s true because they’re so different. They’re such different working processes. For instance, Smiling Friends is just Zach [Hadel] and I writing scripts. We attack that show with a different type of mindset, even in production. Koala Man was much more trying to follow The Simpsons’ model where Matt Groening is this curator of his own universe. I do voices, I give notes, I help storyboard, but it really is about giving control to other people, whether it’s the showrunners, writers, or animators and artists. It’s more of a delegation job, than anything. 

DK: Dan and Benji, you both have previous experience with subverting superheroes through things like The Tick. Is that fun territory for you to return to and do you hold much reverence for superheroes? 

Benji Sami: Absolutely, we’re genre geeks at the end of the day. Comics, superheroes, books, shows…It’s all what we grew up with and continue to consume.

Dan Hernandez: For me, it’s an indivisible part of my DNA and personality. I can’t ride a bike. I can’t rollerblade. I can’t ski. But I can tell you when Juggernaut makes his first appearance in X-Men. Getting to work on something like The Tick was actually extremely beneficial to Koala Man because much like Michael Cusack–Ben Edlund is The Tick. He talks like The Tick. He thinks like The Tick. He invented The Tick when he was 17 years old and he is The Tick. In that experience it was interesting to figure out how to pitch what the Tick would say to The Tick. How do you start to think of these characters in these terms, or pitch new characters that can comfortably fit into this world? What I noticed from Ben is that he had a very strict idea of the integrity of the world and the characters that he designed. There were funny ideas and characters, but if they couldn’t be run through the filter of what the Tick would do or what was right for his world then he wouldn’t do them. 

We kind of carried this over into Koala Man when we started running its writers room. We started to ask who these characters are and emphasize that it’s not worth selling them out for the sake of a joke and let’s really be strict about what they would do, how they’d react, and what kind of superheroics will be in this world. For me, that superheroic background was invaluable. I briefly worked at Virgin Comics as an editor. It’s a world that I love to return to over and over again. All of those stories are just ingrained into my psyche and as a result I’m able to synthesize a moment from The Killing Joke, draw parallels between something in Koala Man, and then connect those dots. Those types of references are very accessible to me and are crucial when you’re doing a show that’s both making fun of superheroes, but also still telling an actual superhero story. You need both a reverence for the source material, but also the ability to recognize when those moments are inherently silly.

DK: On that note, one of the things that I love most about this show is that it’s as much of an origin story for Liam, Alison, and the rest of the Williams family as it is Kevin’s story. Was that an important dynamic to include? 

BS: Complete arcs for the entire family were one of the first goals that we set out to accomplish in the beginning. We wanted to develop not just this main character, but his family, the town–give the town its own arc even! 

DH: I think it’s important for things to be dynamic. The Simpsons doesn’t have that luxury a lot of the time. Sure, there are occasional events like the death of Maude Flanders, but in general, episodes reset. In the streaming world and with only eight episodes to tell a story, I don’t think you want that to feel static by the end of the journey. I think what’s more exciting is to feel like you’re in a different place than when this story started. If we’re fortunate to get multiple seasons then those stories will carry over. At the end of season one and going into season two there’s a new status quo and that’s good. It makes things feel as if everyone is able to evolve, not just in a physical sense, but also emotionally. 

No one is in the same place that they were when the season started. They’ve all gone after these things that they thought they wanted and discovered that it’s either not what they wanted, that it’s hollow, or that they’ve recommitted themselves to something different. I think at the beginning of the season Koala Man is very consumed with how people perceive him, even though he doesn’t want to be. By the end of the season he doesn’t care as much anymore because he’s gone through all of these incredible experiences. He’s “passed through the veil of life and death,” which inherently changes someone. I think that ability to be dynamic over the course of a season–or hopefully multiple seasons–is so exciting. 

MC: I think you can get away with a lot of weird, fantastical stuff as long as your characters still feel real, with actual wants and needs. Even the mom working at the kids’ school was very orchestrated so that the cast wasn’t too divided. You never want to split into A-B-C-D plots. Having the mom be close to the kids was convenient, but it also just felt realistic to my childhood. We had canteens–which I believe are cafeterias in America–and everyone’s mom temporarily worked there. 

DK: You guys really find an excellent balance between standalone and serialized stories. One of my favorite episodes is the flashback to Dapto in 1912. You create such a rich supernatural history for Dapto. Would you be interested in doing an episode that’s completely set in the past and further explores its roots?

MC: Yeah, it’s great to approach Dapto as a Twin Peaks or Gravity Falls. It is this fantastical version of Australia–Dapto is a real place that exists, but it’s not this. The thing with Koala Man that’s funny to me is because he doesn’t have any superpowers and it’s grounded in many elements. However, it’s also quite fantastical in many other ways. The reason for that is so the show is never predictable. We can go in any direction that we want so that Koala Man’s villains don’t always have no powers. We can throw an alien into the mix if we want. It’s all whatever feels natural and Dapto is still a bit of a mystery to us in many respects. I think we’ll definitely learn more about it and even through season one Dapto became a great tool to figure out why Koala Man is the way that he is. That’s the best thing about having a writers’ room and reaching unexpected places with all of this. 

DH: The origins of Dapto are something that we’ve extensively talked about. We look at Dapto as a kind of Twin Peaks. The roots of Dapto are mysterious, supernatural, and anything can happen in Dapto.

BS: We definitely want to explore more of that, if we’re so lucky to.

DH: It is something that we were very conscious towards and I’m glad that it came through to you. There are things that we know about Dapto that we didn’t even put into the first season, but sometimes just knowing those things and having a greater authority on the rules of it all is helpful. There’s a moment in Lord of the Rings that I often think of where Tolkien is like, “they passed this hill–but what they didn’t know about this hill is that 2000 years ago a crazy battle was fought there…” It’s basically just Tolkien being like, “I know that. They don’t know that, but I know that.” I always thought that style of writing was a funny flex in the middle of the book. So we started to ask similar questions about Dapto to figure out why it is how it is and that’s something that we’re super excited to continue to explore in the future.

DK: You have those great moments where you refer to things like The Great Emu War and are like, “This is real! Look it up!” And it of course is all real. Were you proud to be able to fit all of these cultural touches into the show?

MC: My main goal and the Golden Rule that I told everyone with this show is just that it had to be Australian. I couldn’t make a show that would have me embarrassed to show my face in Australia again. It would break my heart if the show got “Hollywood-ed” and that’s what happens if you break your focus. The good news is that 20th Century and Hulu were fully on board with making a show that’s completely Australian. Dan and Benji completely understood the mission and it was just a delight to get things like showbags and the Great Emu War through. Half the writers’ room is Australian and half is American. The Aussies would typically say something that’s everyday and normal in Australia, but uncommon to the Americans, who would then help elevate it. It led to this great back-and-forth where even though there are a lot of Americans on staff they’re all in service of elevating Australian point of views. 

DK: Michael Cusack is Australian, but did you two have much of a relationship with Australia before working on the show and has that changed at all? 

BS: We’ve gone from zero to being fully immersed in it, non-stop, every day. It was actually kind of liberating and exciting once we got into it. We’ve spent a lot of time in writers’ rooms on different shows and you hit that classic problem of, “The Simpsons already did it…” However, there’s never been an Australian primetime animated TV show before, so any uniquely Australian thing that we tackle becomes one of a kind. We can start talking about the Great Emu War or showbags and all of these things that we’d immediately want to make into the focus of an episode whenever an Australian writer in the room would bring them up. 

DH: Usually they’d mention these things so casually too, since they’re just a part of their culture.  “Oh it’s like when we’d get showbags…” And we’d be like, “What!?” “Oh you don’t have showbags?” There were a lot of moments like that where our American writers would have no idea what they’re talking about, but that was what would make it exciting. It was a big deal when we found out that handball is huge in Australia. For us it’s just something you’d play at recess. All of those specificities were fuel for our stories in a major way. 

BS: And we would never have to overly explain any of these things because most of the television that’s consumed in Australia is from America and they just figure out the cultural differences that they witness on TV. We decided to flip that on its head where we’re just presenting this Australian content and people will figure it out and enjoy it on their own.

DH: One thing that I think that we’ve discovered throughout our careers–and it’s not a unique thought to us, but one that’s still true–the more specific you can be about cultural things ends up making it more universal when people watch it. We discovered that a little bit when we were working on One Day at a Time with Cuban culture–I’m Cuban–and so we’d put very specific things from my life or other Latino writers on the show. We’d get feedback from people in India that were telling us that they did similar things and that they could still relate. That was really eye-opening to us. We never wanted to soften or flatten any of Koala Man’s Australian impulses out of a fear that someone wouldn’t understand them. We wanted to trust our audience to pick this up. 

DK: The cast of acclaimed Australian actors that are assembled here are really incredible. Was it surprising to get all of these people involved? Is Nicole Kidman the ultimate guest?

BS: You make your dream list, but we had no idea that we’d get everyone…Like for Big Greg, we wanted the most Australian personality ever and wrote it with Hugh Jackman in mind, but never expected that he would say yes. He loved it though and its Australian specificity. I think that’s what excited him about it, as well as other people like Hugo Weaving or Miranda Otto or any of these other Australian legends who were just excited to do something uniquely Australian and special.

DH: It was similar with Jemaine Clement, too. We just thought about who we’d want to work with if it could be absolutely anyone. He was on the shortlist of who we wanted the most and he was just so enthusiastic. He crushed it, whether it was with the seriousness that he approached the role or his level of preparation. It was tremendous to witness. Sarah Snook, too! One of the biggest Emmy-nominated stars of the moment and yet she still agreed to do our show. We really hoped that the actors had a good time and took away something positive from the experience, which seems to be the case. We tried to make it a fun environment and there was a lot of laughing. We have such an all-star team of Australian talent!

DK: Finally, have you been able to think much about season two at this point and know where you’d like to go with it? Can you tease what’s ahead for Dapto?

MC: Koala Man is always built up to be someone who has to fight graffiti kids or loud cars–things like that–only for it to always evolve into something bigger. I’d kind of like him to take on more petty villains, without powers, and see where we could take that. I think there’s still a lot of “boring” characters in Dapto who can become rewarding villains, even if it seems like they wouldn’t. 

BS: There’s a post-credit tag at the end of season one! In a hypothetical season two, that will definitely pay off.

DH: It kind of hints that there might be other superheroes in this version of Australia. If season two were to happen then i think that would be a huge part of it. Who else is out there and is Koala Man on their radar. 

Season One of ‘Koala Man’ is available to stream on Hulu on January 9th, read our review here.