Matthew Senreich: Sen-rish. [long i].
N.B.: Senreich. Okay.
Matthew Senreich: Yeah. Everybody pronounces it differently. My dad and grandpa pronounce it differently. I grew up a f----d up kid. (Chuckling)
N.B.: Your own family members pronounce it differently?
Matthew Senreich: Yeah. They like to just tease me as much as possible. I don’t know.
N.B.: That’s funny.
Matthew Senreich: I know. But yeah, how are you doing today?
N.B.: I’m good! And my husband and I watched the Robot Chicken screener the other night for the next Star Wars special.
Matthew Senreich: Oh cool. Was it okay?
N.B.: Of course! It was great!
Matthew Senreich: Oh good. Good, good, good.
N.B.: Well, we loved the first one.
Matthew Senreich: Good to know.
N.B.: Yeah, we loved the first one, and this one was – ‘cause sometimes, as you know, sequels are like, “Eh, whatever.” But no, it was awesome.
Matthew Senreich: Good. Good, good, good. Yeah, we got to do a bunch of different things in this and actually told somewhat of a story, which is something we always strive to do here.
N.B.: I guess there was sort of a story.
Matthew Senreich: Yeah. You know, we followed the through-line.
N.B.: Yeah. Yeah.
Matthew Senreich: It kept coming back to it. That was the one good thing for it. So, yeah, I don’t think many people will notice, but for us it was like, “Okay” – we wanted to just – “How did these bounty hunters get hired?”
N.B.: (Laughter) Yeah. I loved the scene with – well, I loved a lot of the scenes, but yeah, the bounty hunter scenes were great. You know, I’m watching that stuff and I’m thinking, “How in the world do they get that kind of an angle on the scenes from Star Wars?” How do you guys come up with that stuff?
Matthew Senreich: For like the – for our story lines?
N.B.: Yeah, like the “bring your daughter to work day” for the Storm Trooper, or the AT- ATs are racing. You know, who watches that and thinks, “What if?”
Matthew Senreich: We have an amazing writer’s room of guys who grew up with Star Wars, love it to death, and we all just kind of sit around and laugh about things. The good thing about all the writers in the room is we’ve been friends for so long, so we’ve just talked about the randomness of watching these things, and we love to put the mundane to the absurd. It is just, “Here’s this guy working as a Storm Trooper, and what would his day-to-day be like if this was just an ordinary job?”, and we like taking that aspect to it and just applying these everyday jobs to all these people in this crazy universe. Like, “What if they had to drag race with these crazy AT-ATs?”
N.B.: Right. Right. Well and the Emperor’s stuff is –
Matthew Senreich: Yeah, he’s turned into my favorite character of all.
N.B.: Seth McFarlane, of course, does a wonderful job.
Matthew Senreich: He’s amazing, and there’s a reason he’s as successful as he is. The fact that we get to lure him in and have him play with us like this is great. Yeah, he’s really taken that character to a new level for us.
N.B.: Does he do any improvisation when he’s reading that?
Matthew Senreich: No. For the most part, McFarlane’s really good about sticking to the script. He’ll once in a while throw in something, but I would say 95 percent of the time, it’s all stuff that’s on paper. Whereas I always joke that Breckin Meyer’s the opposite, and we laugh that we give just Breckin a blank page, and as he says, “Just put genius on it”, and that’s him.
N.B.: That’s funny. I didn’t realize that he was so into improvising his performances.
Matthew Senreich: Yeah. If you watch the Boba Fett stuff, most of that stuff was written, but the DVD outtakes for that are going to be great ‘cause that whole "lightsaber red and blue make purple rain" bit, he just did that on the spot. Yeah, he’s just a funny guy.
N.B.: So do you animate then based on what he gives as dialogue?
Matthew Senreich: Yes. All the dialogue is done beforehand.
N.B.: Oh!
Matthew Senreich: Yeah, we put the dialogue to the storyboards and we create what’s called an animatic, so everything is locked. We know the timing of everything, and then that animatic goes down to our animators and they animate the actual bits based on the dialogue and the timing.
N.B.: That’s a slightly different process [than most cartoons], but it makes sense.
Matthew Senreich: Yeah, because otherwise, yeah, it would be too hard to do lip assignment and all the other types of things, and know how long certain sketches would last.
N.B.: Right.
Matthew Senreich: But, yeah, it all starts with our storyboards and our voice talent.
N.B.: Who came up with the father/son dance-off?
Matthew Senreich: It was a fun argument to listen to because Tom Root, who’s one of our head writers and co-producers, just wanted to see these guys dance. He did this Vulturine dance-off for us in our regular season, and he’s just big into watching people dance. And we did the father/son thing, and our other head writer, Doug Goldstein, thought it was too much in the father/son. He thought the montage should be a little more subdued. And for me –
N.B.: Robot Chicken subdued? That doesn’t work.
Matthew Senreich: I know. He wanted the more subtle approach to that scene, and Seth [Green] and I sided with Tom on this one, and I feel guilty for saying that, but there’s something funny about watching these guys dance. It just – it was slightly spectacular.
N.B.: Where did the choreography come from?
Matthew Senreich: You know, to give Seth a lot of credit for that, he sat through so much stuff and dance footage, and actually danced out a bunch of it himself.
N.B.: Oh my gosh. Yeah because some of it, it was fairly complicated.
Matthew Senreich: Yeah, he did a really good job of finding what he thought was the best moves to be done for all of them.
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