Matthew Senreich: Yes. Our animators who end up doing it definitely groan a little bit before they do it, but the scenes they do are just amazing. I think it’s a love and hate situation. They know when they have that finished product, they’re very happy with it.
N.B.: Right. Does it take much longer to animate that sort of scene?
Matthew Senreich: A little bit longer, yeah. We had an animator named Joe Mello who probably spent, gosh, it must have been almost a week doing that scene.
N.B.: Oh, brutal.
Matthew Senreich: It took a long time. And each of our animators animate probably about eight seconds a day.
N.B.: So you went from Wizard [Magazine] to this?
Matthew Senreich: Yes. Crazy.
N.B.: Yeah. Was it gradual, or immediate? You know, you talk to Seth and you call up Wizard and say, “That’s it, I quit.”?
Matthew Senreich: It was kind of – it was somewhat easy for me. It was one of those things where – how did it happen? I was working at Wizard and I met Seth through an interview that I did I guess back in ’97 or ’98, and we just became friends. He was just a big fan of the magazine, and I was working at ToyFare Magazine specifically.
N.B.: I love that magazine.
Matthew Senreich: And, yeah, a lot of the writers from Robot Chicken were working on it with me. And in 2000, Seth came to me after we were friends, he’s like, “Hey, I want to do these type of shorts. I’m going on Conan O’Brien. I thought it would be fun to bring a little animated short of my toy and Conan’s toy doing some adventure.” So we put something like that together and wrote it all out on the east coast, and as we were doing that, the Internet was up and running, and Sony Digital paid us to do 12 animated shorts. So I was doing that from New York while working at Wizard, and I let Wizard know I was doing it. They were beyond supportive of me. And we never really thought it was going to go further than the Internet.
And then once that was done, we had about an hour worth of footage, and we shopped it around as a pilot, and it took us until about 2004 to get it up and running at Cartoon Network and Adult Swim.
N.B.: What made you guys decide to shop it as a pilot? You just watched it and thought, “This is great”?
Matthew Senreich: You know, it came out so much better than we thought it would. We laughed about the fact that we wrote it and we were like – we thought it was funny, but the animators did such a better job of making it good. We were like, “Wow, this could actually be something.”
N.B.: It’s kind of like the Twisted Toyfare Theater come to life.
Matthew Senreich: Yes. Twisted ToyFare Theater. Yeah. Doug and Tom were writing for Twisted ToyFare Theater since its inception. So yeah, it was nice.
N.B.: Are those shorts available on any of the DVDs?
Matthew Senreich: Some of the animated shorts are available on the first DVD, and then some of them we repurposed for the show. Like our "Real World Metropolis" sketch was something we did for Sony’s website. We re-did it and re-animated it and made it a little funnier.
N.B.: When you re-did it for TV, as opposed to Sony, were you able to let loose a little more, or did you have to tighten the reins a little more?
Matthew Senreich: It was about the same. Adult Swim was great creatively. They let us do almost anything we want. They’re just a great partner. If anything, it just gave us more time to animate, so it was a little more fluid, and we can make things look a lot better. The backgrounds look better. So we just – we hyped it up a little bit.
N.B.: I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone who works in TV say that they have more time to do something.
Matthew Senreich: I know. Well the Internet was a very intense venture. I’d work 8:00 to 6:00 at the day job, and then 6:00 to 4:00 a.m. on the Internet job. I remember those six months of my life being very hellish.
N.B.: I’m sure you were younger then. Don’t you look back sometimes and think, “Thank God I was that young because I couldn’t do it today.”
Matthew Senreich: I have no idea how I pulled that off, but it was – looking back, I look back on it fondly. I can remember more than one time saying, “I don’t know how I’m ever going to survive.” But I always forget. It’s the same thing with every season of Robot Chicken. At the end of the season, Seth and I are like, “I don’t know how we’re ever gonna do that again”, and then a month or two out, we’re like, “Oh, when do we start up again?”
N.B.: How long does it take to put a season together from writing to finished product?
Matthew Senreich: 20 episodes in about 11 months.
N.B.: Wow.
Matthew Senreich: Yeah, so it’s a long process for stop-motion animation, but yeah, we crank it out.
N.B.: How did you go about hiring animators and writers?
Matthew Senreich: With the writers, a lot of them we go for a little bit more obscure places. A handful of them came out from Wizard Magazine with me. One guy won a Wizard video contest – has a bunch of videos on YouTube that we saw that we just thought were funny.
N.B.: I was picturing guys getting plucked out of line at [Sci-Fi] conventions.
Matthew Senreich: Yeah. It’s the more obscure people. We have two guys who actually have a Broadway show coming up called Famous Last Nerds. It’s like the rivalry between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. So they’re doing Broadway.
