“Twenty years in, and they’re still surprising us. Join a more mature ‘Robot Chicken’ on a journey of introspection.”
That’s how Adult Swim and HBO Max are teasing their upcoming “Robot Chicken” Self-Discovery Special in honor of the animated adult stop-motion sketch comedy series’ 20th anniversary. To celebrate, co-creator and star Seth Green got introspective with TheWrap, discussing everything from the show’s celebrity guest stars to how the formation of WBD impacted their output.
“The special came about because Discovery Media bought Warner Bros. and all its subsidiaries, which trickled all the way down to Adult Swim. So there was a shift — not just in the volume of global workforce that were employed, but also the priorities of any of these smaller subsidiaries at the behest of these much larger companies,” Green told TheWrap. “All that to say, no one was green-lighting a new season of 20 quarter-hours. It’s just not happening. Everyone who would have said yes to us got fired and consolidated into a much smaller pinpoint on the graph.”
“So we said, ‘Well, you guys still like some money, right? You still want your iconic legacy brands to have the opportunity to stay economically viable, right?’ And they were like, ‘Yeah, I guess so.’ And we said, ‘Well, we should prioritize making standalone half-hours the way we’ve done in the past and just not concern ourselves with making a whole season,’ sort of what ‘South Park’ has done,” he continued. “It does something better for all these companies because they’re able to observe their performance quarterly, which is exactly what they need the most, and they can also focus their marketing money or any of their capital spends on isolated incidents in the calendar year.”
With that said, no one at Warner Bros. Discovery was censoring his work, either.
“Nobody’s said we couldn’t do anything. Usually, any joke that has an ethical concern gets shot down before it would ever get recorded. But everyone was enormously supportive on this special from Discovery down,” Green said. “It’s not easy for these big companies to work together, even if they own each other, and we didn’t have any friction. This was a blast. I think people will see it in the content, so bananas. I feel like it’s just putting a modern spin. Comedy feels like it evolves all the time, how the audience can take a joke. It’s always evolving, so we just started to pay attention to that.”
“What I’ve had to do over the last 20 years is learn how to speak that language enough to make them understand that we get it. We get what your goals are and what your goals aren’t, and also we get the audience and we know how to give them what they want, which I think is the most important thing in the end,” he added. “All of the companies, they think in widgets and they think throughout the quarters, but they don’t understand why anybody’s buying the things that they’re buying. They just don’t get it. Like, yeah, if we put these bulk operations into effect, this will yield consumer returns across these points, but they don’t understand why pop culture connects to people, why the audience loves all these characters and ideas. So, you know, that’s where we come in — we curate all of that stuff.”
Originally debuting in February 2005, Green co-created “Robot Chicken” with Matthew Senreich, both of whom still executive produce alongside John Harvatine IV, Eric Towner, Tom Root, Doug Goldstein and Williams Street’s Keith Crofford and Walter Newman, as well as Laura Pepper as producer.
So what has changed in the past 20 years? “The budgets change, and, you know, not always for the best or the richer. Like what it costs to get the type of talent, what it costs to get everything put together, to simply procure all of the elements that make the show — sometimes it just costs more,” Green said. “We still we learn from every year, we streamline our process. The greatest thing I have about ‘Robot Chicken’ is faith that we know what we’re doing, and we get the topic and then we assemble the team. And even if we don’t have an idea, I know by the time we get out of that room we’re going to have something that works, because none of us are going to get out of there until it does. Then throughout the whole process, we know where every dollar is spent and make sure that we’re investing in the talent so that you can see it on the screen.”
“Stop-motion is such a gorgeous medium. The fact that Guillermo del Toro won an Oscar for stop-motion, it’s so good for everybody. I’m a big believer in high tides raise all boats,” he shared. “I had enough people give me a shot, just because I displayed enough initiative to return that favor whenever I can. I’m putting a project together — I don’t even know what’s been announced — but there’s, like, no room for anybody that hasn’t done this a million times. So in that case, there’s limited opportunities to put the ladder down, except in an assistant role or in one of these other learning opportunities.”
Over the course of 11 seasons, 11 specials and 220 episodes, the cult favorite has won six Emmys and two Annie Awards. The upcoming 12th special notably features a number of Warner Bros. Discovery properties — including “Scooby-Doo,” “Ghost Hunters,” “Property Brothers,” “Batman” and “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.”
“We love Guy Fieri. I don’t know if I can express that enough. Like, I already thought he was cool, but then when we got to meet him and work with him? Holy cow, that guy’s impressive,” he gushed — but not everyone gets to voice themselves.
“It really depends on the bit. In this case, it really served the joke to have it be him. Everything about the joke works better because it’s actually him,” Green explained. “There’s a lot of times where the joke is not that and it’s more fun to have something entirely random.”
And for Green, he isn’t making a mockery of the pop culture institutions — he’s celebrating them: “I have to sort of love and appreciate, sincerely, whatever the thing is for me to even get a joke that would be funny and not just like s–t-talking or nay-saying it. I don’t like those kinds of jokes, I don’t find them funny. I find whenever you have some kind of clever interpretation of something and just posit something else in a believable way, it makes it much, much funnier.”
“The rights all depend on the joke you want to tell. And in the cases where we’ve gone after companies, it’s because it’s advantageous to both of us to do this kind of piece. Whoever the brand-holder, the rights-holder, is, they recognize the shape of whatever this would take as kind of an opportunity to express something about themselves,” he further detailed of the logistical process. “Over time, what we’ve earned is that we’re not trying to hurt completely, we’re really just trying to make everybody laugh.”
In addition to “Robot Chicken,” Green’s illustrious career has also included other iconic projects like “Austin Powers,” “Family Guy,” “Rat Race,” “Without a Paddle,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed,” to name a few. And after 40 years in the industry, he’s just happy to entertain.
“I’ll have 20-year-old kids or a 25-year-old tell me that they grew up on the show and I don’t know how to even absorb that. I just think about how I grew up on all kinds of stuff that informed my sense of humor, my sensibility, how I problem-solve — all of that I learned from TV and movies,” Green shared. “I love this business. I’m a show folk no matter how I want to dress it up. I’m one of these Carnies that likes to travel, get a bunch of people together, put on a show and make the audience say, ‘Wow.’ Like, that’s my favorite thing to do. So just to the degree that I’ve continued to be able to do that, I feel contented and I love to do the work, so I get to enthusiastically keep working. The degree to which that’s had an impact on anyone else, it’s kind of hard to process personally without it doing weird things to my own ability to look in the mirror.”
“This is an unbelievable experience to be having, to have made something that an audience has felt comfortable claiming and to create this ever-evolving community of fans and enthusiasts who shamelessly commune with one another in celebration of the stuff we all love,” he concluded. “It’s wild, it’s wild and I love it. I love that this happened and that this continues to happen.”
The “Robot Chicken: Self-Discovery Special” airs Sunday, July 20, on Adult Swim and streams the next day on HBO Max.
