NYCC 2015: ‘Robot Chicken’ Press Interviews

DSCN2369

Despite waking up with a bit of a hangover from the previous night’s festivities, I sat down at my first interview of the day with confidence. After all, the host of the party I attended the evening before was Robot Chicken, and that is exactly who I would be talking to shortly. This year, the show’s representatives were actor/writer Breckin Meyer, executive producer/co-head writer Tom Root, and director Tom Sheppard.

So, what’s new, guys?

“Well, we have our eighth season, and our third DC Comics special,” Root said. “Which means more of the same, and everything’s different.”

That may sound like a playful answer, but for a show that makes a living off of satirizing the ever-changing world, it’s an absolutely accurate description. “Because we kind of praise and mock pop culture, which continues to grow and change … we just have more and more subject matter to play with,” Meyer explained. “It keeps growing, so we keep having fun with it.”

Still, with a show that’s been on the air for so long, there’s always a need to expand its targets. “There are so few sacred cows left after eight seasons,” Root said. “I think we’re taking joy out of picking on targets that really don’t deserve it. Like things that children hold near and dear to their hearts. Nobody is safe.”

“We’re going to a lot of wells this season,” Sheppard added. “We’re doing everything from the preschool properties to strange documentaries, we’re doing a Grizzly Man sketch … it’s not very tasteful.”

DSCN2477

“We were just talking about a skit that comes on this season,” Breckin volunteered, “a Michael Bay skit, about where he gets his inspiration.”

I’m definitely looking forward to that, as someone who personally bashes Bay whenever I get the opportunity. Although it’s important to clarify that just because the RC folks spoof something, it doesn’t mean they don’t enjoy it. “Game of Thrones is something that I just love – I’ve seen all the episodes, I’ve read all the books – and yet, I want to tell jokes about it all the time,” Root revealed. “We wouldn’t be doing things like the DC specials if we didn’t love these characters and hadn’t grown up with them and had a fondness for them. It just depends on how you attack the sketch.”

Speaking of the DC Comics episode (a.k.a. Robot Chicken DC Comics Special III: Friendship is Magic, set to premiere Sunday, October 18th at midnight on Adult Swim), everyone of course had an awful lot to say on the topic, especially the fact that some didn’t think the first one would even happen.

“I never thought we would get into the DC world like we did,” Meyer explained. “DC and LucasFilm, those two were things we were always delicately touching on, because they’re litigious and protect their properties – as they should – but once we broke into the DC world and once George [Lucas] okayed our stuff, we were like, ‘Oh wow, okay, we can play in anybody’s playground.’ So those have been really fun to mess with. We haven’t touched on the new movies yet, partially because we’re fans of these, and I don’t want to know anything about it until I see it.”

They wouldn’t have even had room in this latest special for extra content, as many sketches had to be cut. “With the special we wrote a lot of sketches to start with,” Sheppard said, “and we hadn’t really flushed out the story beyond it being about Batman and Superman’s friendship. So we had such a wealth of sketches that by the time we actually wrote the story – and that took up most of the episode – we had to get rid of a lot of great things.”

“There’s this weird, dumb, rule that if something doesn’t make it into a special, or doesn’t make it into a season, we have to throw it out and start all over again,” Root explained regarding the production of RCDCIII. However, not all of the trimmed content got left on the cutting room floor.

“We do have a few stragglers from the DC Comics special that actually made it into the season of Robot Chicken later on, so we’ll still be mining the DC gold for the entire season. So if you see a sketch that has DC characters in it in the regular season, that’s one that wasn’t good enough for the DC special, but was good enough at a desperate moment to fill out the show,” Sheppard joked.

“We had a joke or sketch and – I actually don’t know if it was cut for content or because it wasn’t funny enough or it wasn’t what we wanted the show to be – but the Joker, instead of the Joker venom, he created the Jerker venom,” Root teased.

“…And he can’t stop,” Sheppard added, laughing.

Robot Chicken 1

And some material never even makes it to the production phase. “I’m always trying to get the Teen Titans into the specials, because I grew up reading Teen Titans comics. I really want to see them animated as much as possible, but I get shot down over and over,” Root said.

Is it because some jokes are too obscure? Nope. And Tom Root had a story to prove it: “I think before BBC rebooted Dr. Who – we had a sketch where our doctor was standing on first base in a baseball stadium and he just shouts at the camera: ‘Do you get it?!’ And we thought, ‘This is going to go by so fast and nobody is going to be able to recognize him, and it’s so stupid; let’s not do this.’ But then we did it, and we have people that still remember it to this day. So the answer is no, nothing is too obscure.”

And no amount of celebrities is too many either, apparently. In season eight alone, Robot Chicken welcomed J.K. Simmons, Jane Krakowski, John Krasinski, Bryan Cranston, Tom Kenny, Rob Paulsen, Billy West, Jennie Garth, Jennette McCurdy, Henry Winkler, Burt Ward, Adam West, Alfred Molina, Martin Freeman, and Seth MacFarlane.

It seems like almost everyone wants to take part in the show, and they rarely have reservations about what they’re asked to say or do. “Every once in a while we’ll rewrite a line on the fly,” Root said, “but it doesn’t happen too often.”

“Sometimes voice actors or actors won’t want to reprise a role that made them famous,” Sheppard explained, “but other times, like, we got the entire cast of The Wild Thornberries to come to our ‘Wild Thornberries: Wild as Fuck’ sketch.”

DSCN2396

Some people even call up Robot Chicken ask to be on the show. “Every once in a while, we’ll hear that somebody’s into it,” Root said. “And sometimes it turns out not to be true. Like, I think we heard Anne Hathaway really wanted to do the show, and then [it turned out] she would never agree to do the show. We asked quite a few times.”

“Other times, actors would come in and we’re just completely shocked how much they love the show,” Sheppard added. “Like, we had Jared Harris [Mad Men, Fringe] in, and we were really excited to have him and we didn’t think he’d say yes, and he came in and couldn’t stop telling us how much he loved the show. He’ll be on this season. He’s in a James Bond sketch.”

Even though the eighth season hasn’t even started yet, and the DC Comics special hasn’t been released, the guys are still talking about possible ideas for the next special and the next season.

“We’ve talked about Star Trek … we talked about doing an all-J.J. Abrams special, because J.J. has so many fun avenues you can play with … There’s a new one coming up that we just started talking about doing that I can’t talk about – legally I’m not allowed to talk about it yet – but it will probably be our next special, which is all about a particular property.”

That may be all they can say, or all that might exist at this moment, but there’s one thing we can be certain of: it will probably be hilarious.

[Photos by Becca Green]