Sealab 2021 - Adam Reed

Yes it’s done by a New York band called Calamine. They’re not still together but they were a terrific band.

We left it up to them. I had a crush on the lead singer, Julie Stepanek, and I was hoping that I would parlay the theme song into us getting married which didn’t happen. I would invite her to dinner to talk about it and she would tell me we didn’t need to go to dinner because she would just write the song. I just wanted to smell her hair!

If there is a philosophy I don’t know what it is. There might be one. We try to make ourselves laugh and [senior vice president of Cartoon Network's Adult
Swim] Mike Lazzo laugh because he signs the checks.

The only feedback I get about that is from the forums of Adult Swim. Everybody on there just trashes the shit out of the show but every Monday morning I still go to see what they wrote. It’s such a downer. Every Monday morning I get kicked in the teeth.

I disagree with every negative comment and I get very defensive. “Internet nerds, you’re probably living in your mom’s basement. You don’t know how hard it is to make good TV.” I don’t know, they’re all into anime and I’m not.

I can’t watch five minutes of it.

I think there is something strange about an adult that would sit down and write multiple postings about a cartoon. Shouldn’t they be mowing their lawn or something?

It’s a really small crew. There is me and Matt then four other guys. The four other guys draw and animate while Matt and I direct and edit. For me I’m just a control freak so it drives me crazy to have anyone else do anything. I tend to micro-manage. The other thing is that we’re cheap. It would be nice to pay a producer to oversee the other guys but one of the show’s selling points was that we wouldn’t charge a lot of money for it. The profit margin is pretty slim.

No, they’re not hands off but they allow us our freedom. They don’t really ever get in our production process unless we’re three weeks behind schedule, then we will get a phone call. We’re pretty autonomous.

Yes All That Jazz (aka Jazz Cola) was co-written with us by Matt Maiellaro and Dave Willis [creators of Aqua Teen Hunger Force].

Those guys are hilarious and it was a blast. I would like to do it more. Matt [Thompson] and I have on occasion gone over there to brainstorm for a Space Ghost. Nothing usually comes of that, it’s usually all these guys sitting around trying to crack each other up.

It is. We put a lot of pop culture references in. Stuff that we liked when we were kids. It’s sort of a crutch because you know you will get a moderate laugh because it’s a common thing everyone can relate to.

No I didn’t. I want The A-Team to live in my memory. I find when I watch old TV shows I am just appalled at how low the production value is.

Yeah, like the old Charlie Brown specials. When they came on at Thanksgiving and Christmas I thought they were the best things in the world. I’ve watched a couple of them recently and found they weren’t good at all. Do you remember The Superstars?

It was NFL and MLB players competing at track and field. It was my favorite show of all time when I was a kid and I recently saw some episodes and it was terrible. They’ve got the jittery chyron and they had their socks pulled up to their knees. So I try not to watch anything old because it makes me sad.

Yes it is. It’s Henry Fonda, James Cagney and Jack Lemmon. They’re all on a navy ship in World War 2.

Me. Mister Roberts was the first DVD I ever bought and nobody has heard of it.

I think Lazzo knew it. He’s got an encyclopedic knowledge of everything that’s been filmed or taped. He’s incredibly tuned in to culture. It’s hard to get a reference by him.

A lot of times if you work on a joke too much it just dies. It will either be right the first time or it will never be right. Tweaking something indefinitely costs us money because the animators have to sit around waiting for us and I’m only so funny anyway. A lot of times you end up making the joke different and not necessarily better.

Yeah it did. We were all floored by his death. The cool thing is his son is now the new captain with a different voice and a different character. We were close to Harry’s family because he brought his wife in when he recorded. Both his daughter and his son are voice actors. We just had his daughter be the guest villain in a voice we are doing now.

The character of Captain Murphy was a great catalyst for dumbness. His crazy little mindset would easily fuel 11 minutes of stuff. The Happy Cake Oven episode is a perfect example because he’s like a little kid in charge of all these people. When Harry died and we got rid of Captain Murphy we kind of lost that simple way to fuel an episode of absurdity.

I just read the coolest quote about American humor. I think it was Mark Twain who said that the whole basis of American humor is absurdity and trying to disguise the fact that it is absurd. It is absurd and we break all those good rules about plot construction. We use the Deus Ex Machina all the time because we don’t know how to end the show, so we blow it up. I doubt whether it makes for excellent writing but it’s fun to make.

No.

I guess that’s our sense of humor. More and more of late we are locking horns with the network’s Standards & Practices department about stuff. It’s weird stuff like the fact that we can’t say the word Jesus but we can show somebody getting murdered. A script we are working on now there is a guy thanking Jesus Christ and the Standards & Practices walk in, a big argument ensues and he ends up murdering the S & P guys. It turns out Aqua Teen had written the exact same script two weeks ago. We are all getting mad at the same people.

We get notes. If a script gets approved creatively it goes to a separate script clearance company who tells us what they might have problems with. Simultaneously it goes to Cartoon Network’s legal department where they read it and then the Standards people read it. We get notes from all three making suggestions and telling us to take certain stuff out.

Actually our script clearance company does. It’s these five really nice ladies who live somewhere in Massachusetts and if we say Rolls-Royce they’ll give us suggestions for new names. We just had an episode where a guy walks in with a box of Krispy Kremes. They said we can’t do that but their alternate names were like Sugar Bombs.

Probably funnier for us because it’s so ridiculous. Now we have a guy carrying a box of Sugar Bombs and we think that’s hilarious.

Oh really? I’m not really in the merchandising loop.

No, nor the DVDs. It’s not the best contract in the world. Turner plays hardball with their suppliers. It’s like, here’s the contract you can sign it or go home. So we signed the contract. The interesting thing is that when we first sent them the pitch and Lazzo said he wanted it we got a contract from Turner legal. The first page of it said “You have used a Turner owned property for this pitch. Legally we can sue you. Sign this contract or we’re going to sue you.” We instantly got on the phone with Lazzo and he said “What? Don’t sign that!” It actually took like ten months of back and forth between us and Turner legal to get an acceptable contract. Even then it’s more of a writ of servitude than a contract.

Maybe but I haven’t had time to look into any of those doors because I’m so busy. We’re too busy to come up with new show ideas. But if and when we do it will be easier to sell it.

Just the internet people, the web posters.

The show would have to end then we would we rest first. But it’s such a daunting thing. Writing a screenplay is hard. I know if there is a movie to be made there would be two years of script meetings and tweakings to be done. Then there is more money and people involved which seems like a nightmare.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck