Seth Green

TOYS WITH ATTITUDE

Seth Green’s new Adult Swim show features toys behaving badly

Long-time character actor Seth Green (“Without a Paddle,” “The Italian Job”) has partnered with former ToyFare editor Matthew Senreich to create an all-new show for Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, coming next month. ToyFare sat down with the 29-year-old Los Angelino (and admitted fan of our magazine) to get him to explain it to us in terms we could understand.

TOYFARE: So what did you think of the new issue of ToyFare? .

GREEN: I read the magazine about nine times. At least. And then I just start flipping through it. But I go through and I spot all its different elements. You know, first, it’s like “Incoming,” then “Twisted ToyFare Theatre,” then some of the articles. And then I get into the letter pages, and I read depending on what my activity is. Oh, and by the way, you have to let me know if Palisades makes an Oz [from “Buffy”] PalZ. You have to let me know! I’ve got to find that. That’s too cool.

I’m sure Palisades would love to know you’re jonesing for an Oz PalZ. .

I’m trying real hard to be friends with those guys, they’ve always been nice to me.

Did they ask you to come out to a convention? .

I don’t do that stuff. I’m not into it. The personal appearances with signings and stuff, I just have a terrible time with it. Though I did one, I went to ComiCon the year that everybody from “Buffy” except for Sarah [Michelle Gellar] went, and we did a panel. And it was fun, because we did a panel. And then we did a signing afterwards, and I was like, I don’t like this at all. But the main reason was because it was like a conveyor belt, you know.

People just go down the line....

Yeah. You don’t get to have any kind of conversation with anybody, you wind up signing something, it’s a rush, you know, they don’t get what they want, people rushing to say what they want to say... I don’t like that, I like a more, even if it’s a quick interaction, just a little bit more of a personal interaction. And plus, getting paid to sign autographs always makes me uncomfortable. It’s not my thing.

All right, let’s get to “Robot Chicken.” .

All right, let’s get to the “Robot Chicken.”

Let’s find out first why it’s called “Robot Chicken.” .

Um, “Robot Chicken” was a dish from the Chinese restaurant where we ordered take-out, while we were writing the show.

What is in Robot Chicken? Why do they call it Robot Chicken?

Who the hell knows?! It didn’t make any sense, we were like, Robot Chicken? What the f---?! But you have to understand, “Robot Chicken” was one of 60 titles that we came up with. I mean, we came up with dozens and dozens of titles, submitted about 30 of them through clearances, and “Robot Chicken” was the one that cleared. Isn’t that crazy? I mean, the show was called everything from “Attatoy” to “The No-No Place.” I mean, we titled this everything from “Vegetable Fun Fest” to “S&M Presents.’” We had a rough go of it man, we had a rough go of it. And now we give you “Robot Chicken.” [Laughs]

Is there going to be a bumper at the beginning of the show with a robot chicken? . Yeah, yeah. We organized a great opening sequence to explain the origin of “Robot Chicken” and kind of an explanation of the format of the show.

And what is the format of the show? .

Well, it’s a stop-motion variety show. It’s like “Saturday Night Live” with stop motion. Only it’s funnier.

The toys you use in your stop-motion animation-do you use existing toys, or custom-made toys, or a combination of both? .

A combination of both, depending on what it is. You know, there’s all sorts of complicated clearance processes for getting usage of stuff, but there is some legality under the parody umbrella, which is why “SNL” and “Mad TV” can do the things that they do, because they’re making fun of pop culture or current events, or something very familiar. You know, you have to really demonstrate that what you’re doing is effective parody as opposed to just making Superman a stand-up comic. So, we use a lot, we use some old stuff-everything has to be modified in one way or another, both for legal and animation purposes. But people are going to recognize quite a bit and be excited about it.

In terms of your characters, you go with the....

There are no consistent characters. We only have like one or two recurring things and they’re more like genres. We have a bloopers segment, where it’s bloopers from around the world. In our first show, we have bloopers from “Diff’rent Strokes,” “Pokémon” and “Battlestar Gallactica,” stuff like that. So the bloopers host recurs. But he’s one of the only characters that you see over and over again. That’s why this show is so hard to produce, because every week, we’re generating 60-70 new characters.

So you parody everything from existing cartoon characters to celebrities, to movies? .

Yeah, we’re all over the place. We have an Olson twins sketch on the table right now.

[Laughs] Very current, very pop culture. .

Yeah. But then we also...gosh, what’s some of the more obscure s--- we started? We’ve got a Smurf thing, you know. I don’t want to list all the titles too much, ’cause we’re really not trying to give anybody advance warning to sue us. [Laughs]

Can you at least tell us what we might be seeing in the first episode? .

Umm, trying to remember. Oh yeah, in the first episode, we have a shot-by-shot re-creation of the Kill Bill trailer. You feel me? [Laughs] We also do a spoof of “American Idol,” and we did a spoof of “That ’70s Show,” too.

On which you guest starred a couple of times....

Right. And we got the entire cast of “That ’70s Show” to come do our sketch.

How did you manage that? .

It was crazy though, ’cause we had to clear it all the way through Fox Television and through the production company, Carsey-Werner, since the actors playing the parts in our thing constituted intellectual property. So we had to get it cleared. Isn’t that crazy? The best thing is, I’ve got relationships at Fox, so I was like, “Hey, uh, Gail Berman, wouldn’t it be awesome if you could let me do this?” She was like, “Okay.”

So they were all pretty much okay with it? .

Well you know, you have to run it up the flagpole and just say, “This is why we think it’s funny, this is why we think it’s worthwhile, do you guys think it’s okay? Would you let us do this?” We think it’d be really cool, the actors are all into it, we got the producers to sign off on it, then we got Carsey-Werner to sign off on it, then we got Fox to sign off on it. Same thing with “American Idol.” We got Ryan Seacrest to play himself, as the host of “American Idol.” It’s great because, you know, you get in to the legality of it, but we have all these awesome people who were fun, coming to play on our show.

Sounds like you’ve got a whole list of celebrities. .

Yeah, we’ve got an assload of celebrities, everybody from Sarah Michelle Gellar, Rachael Leigh Cook and Scarlett Johansson to Burt Reynolds, Pat Morita and Mark Hamill. It’s great, I mean this show is jam-packed with guest stars.

How do you get them to participate? .

Well, for the most part, because I’ve been acting for a long time, I know a lot of people. I’ve got relationships with agents and producers and companies and things like that, so I make a lot of calls, You know, Matt [Senreich] and I produced the hell out of this show, but I used any notoriety I had, wherever I could. And I’ll call friends of mine and say, “Do you want to come have fun with us?” There’s no money involved, but people come in and get to do stuff they would never get to do. You know, like we had Mark Hamill come in and do Chucky from Child’s Play. You know what I mean? In our show, you’ll see Voltron break dancing. You may think you’ve seen a lot, but you haven’t seen a thing ’til you’ve seen Voltron break dancing. Let me tell you, the kid’s got some moves. [Laughs]

I’ll definitely want to see that. .

It’s fun.

How long does it take to complete an episode? .

Well, to actually say “complete” is a vague thing. The way the show is done, it’s multiple vignettes that are shuffleable. I know that’s not really a word, but let’s use it in this context because Cartoon Network is looking to cut the show, to group the best sketches all together. So it’s like watching “Saturday Night Live,” you know what I mean? But completing an episode, we started writing this stuff back in June, and now we’re filming-what are we filming?-I think it’s number six or seven. It’s just, you know, there’s a process, so completing an episode is a little vague. But the actual physical production, the animation? Five days.

That doesn’t sound like enough time. .

I know. It’s brutal. All of our animators are sick. [Laughs] We’re trying to discourage the use of stimulants.

When are you going to have Hasbro or some other toy manufacturer sponsor the show? Is that ever gonna happen? .

I don’t know. It really depends on the reaction. I mean, my main argument to any toy maker that thinks that we’re improperly using their toys is your toys have never looked so cool. At one point, we were going to call the show “Paid Advertisement for America’s Top Toy Companies.”

That would have never flown. .

But it’s literally what it is! It’s fantastic adverts. People are gonna see this stuff and be like, “Oh my gosh! Where can I get that?”

We can attest to that.

Well, who knows? I love what we’re making. I mean, it’s the same thing as the Sony show, we made 12 episodes and we were done. And it evolved into this, which is great. But the point is, if all we make are these 20 shows, I think these 20 shows are awesome. And Cartoon Network is DVD happy, so we’re saving all of the cool details. Like original cuts of stuff, you know, deleted scenes like you wouldn’t believe. The entire process, how it’s done, behind the scenes, storyboards, animatics, all of it.

You’re catching all that on film? .

Everything is stored. Each week, I get in front of a video camera and act out the entire episode so that each of the animators has a video of what the action movement and specific direction is.

How often? .

Every week.

That’s commitment. That would be an interesting “extra” on the DVD. .

Does anybody really want that?

What joke or skit was too shocking to make the cut? .

Oh jeez, we’ve got one right now that every single time we read it over, from you know, pitch phase to script phase, we’re like, “We might really f---ing have to cut this.” We put it all the way along, like we’re gonna animate it at this point, but it’s dark, dude. We have this sketch called “America’s Most Tragic Home Videos,” and it’s these horrible videos of people hurting themselves, or grandma’s death on her birthday or whatever. But in this scene, you see in the operating room a baby being delivered, and you hear the crying, and then the crying stops. And you see the doctor just like wide eyed, looking around the room, and he picks up a baby that’s lifeless, and starts like trying to animate the head like a puppet, and whispers out the side of his mouth, [makes baby crying sounds]. And then he looks sheepishly at the parents like, “Oopsey!” So that, I can safely say, is the one that we’ve always been like, “Jeez, that is f---ing dark.” You know what I mean? Do we want to put that on TV? Is that the show we’re making? But we’ve got to see it. Unfortunately, it’s one of those things where you don’t know. You don’t know if it’s too much, or you don’t know if it plays until you see it, so we’ve got to take it all the way through. You may never see it, is the point.

Except on the DVD. .

[Laughs] The DVD shows all, yeah.

“Robot Chicken” debuts on the Adult Swim block on Cartoon Network on Feb. 20 at 11:30 p.m. EST.