IPOD
RADIO
Seth Green And Matthew Senreich
By Daniel Robert Epstein
Feb 24, 2005
I hope a lot of you watched Robot Chicken when it premiered last Sunday. Robot Chicken is going to be the show that breaks Adult Swim to the mainstream. I loved the short sketches such as the Scarecrow getting knifed in the OZ sketch and also the longer sketches like the one where Optimus Prime gets colon cancer.
After the first Austin Powers we all knew that Seth Green was going to be a major creative force in Hollywood. But while he has gotten the chance to improvise in big budget movies like The Italian Job and Without a Paddle we have never seen him do something as the main creative force. But now he’s teamed up with a former editor of ToyFare magazine, Matthew Senreich, to write, direct, produce and lend his voice to Robot Chicken.
New episodes of Robot Chicken will air every Sunday at 11:30 pm on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim.
Check out the official website for Robot Chicken
Daniel Robert Epstein: I thought the first episode was fantastic and I’m not just blowing smoke up your asses.
Seth Green: There is already plenty of smoke up there. I’ve already had to open my mouth up real wide just to let some of the pressure out.
DRE:
Have you guys heard of SuicideGirls before?
SG:
Yeah I knew a girl that was involved with it for a while.
DRE:
So Matt when are we expecting the cease and desist order from [Wizard Magazine Publisher] Gareb Shamus [because of Twisted ToyFare Theatre]?
Matthew Senreich: [laughs] We are really amicable and I talk to those guys pretty much every day. They knew about it when we were doing it for Sony’s website.
DRE:
Was Twisted ToyFare Theatre an inspiration for Robot Chicken at all?
MS:
It’s kind of the reverse. Seth was going to go on Late Night with Conan O’Brien and he wanted to create an action/adventure piece with his toy and Conan O’Brien’s toy doing something stupid.
SG:
I wanted to do stop motion shorts in lieu of an interview.
MS:
Seth was a fan of Twisted ToyFare Theatre so he called me up and asked if me and a couple of other writers wanted to do it with him. As we were producing that first one Sony’s website Screenblast picked it up and wanted to do a few more.
DRE:
Seth I know that you get to improvise in a lot of the movies you work on but have you written screenplays that haven’t gotten produced?
SG:
Yeah I had a movie in development at Disney for two years which was a complete waste of time. It was just a miserable experience which kind of shied me away from producing. But then Matt and I were just planning to do this as an independent self financed project. We got the opportunity to produce it for the Sony site then the opportunity came up to do it for TV. It wasn’t something that we actively sought out but instead it just happened.
DRE:
The show must be a ton of work.
SG:
It is. Matt and I are in the office from 7 am to almost 10 pm every night. We’re just here all the time because we oversee every aspect of production. We’re doing the job, which is exhausting, but it’s also incredibly satisfying. It’s been incredibly rewarding to literally pull something out of nothing and have it get on TV.
DRE:
Seth you’re also a big movie star on top of all this. Is it taking time away from that or are you splitting time up?
SG:
Splitting it up isn’t a very good idea. I actually did a movie in the middle of our production and had to do all the work via remote patching whether it was by email or FedEx. It was a dumb thing to do because the pace is too exhausting to keep up. When I finished that I promised myself I wouldn’t do that again. I’m not going to be working on anything else while we’re doing this.
DRE:
I read that you are going to be doing 20 fifteen minute shows, is that true?
MS:
Yes.
SG:
Yeah we’re wrapping up the filming of the 16th and we’re recording for episodes 18 to 20 now.
DRE:
That’s a huge amount of episodes especially for Adult Swim.
MS:
We’ve been working on this for a while. We started writing back in July 2004 and we started production in September.
DRE:
I thought the whole show was going to be one note jokes but you have some pretty complex stuff in there sometimes.
SG:
One of things we try to do is give each episode three tent poles. The goal is to have three or four sketches that are a bit longer like one to four minutes long.
MS:
We have one eight minute sketch coming up later on.
SG:
It’s going to play as two parter over one episode.
MS:
We realized that the one to two minute sketches play out the best. It’s in and out then we’re on to the next thing.
DRE:
How do you two split up the duties?
MS:
We split them up a little bit but pretty much Seth, me and [head writers] Douglas Goldstein and Tom Root pretty much cover all the aspects. Everything from directing shots, calling agents to sitting with the editors.
SG:
It’s too much work for any one of us to do by ourselves so we really have to work as a cohesive team.
DRE:
The press release was kind of vague about how you two met, “Green and Senreich met through their mutual love of toys and action figures.” Did you meet at some convention?
SG:
It was a furry convention.
MS:
[laughs] When I was at Wizard I saw that Seth was a big action figure collector. So I called up his publicist and she said he would get back to me. A few minutes later Seth called and we just hit it off.
SG:
An editorial director from Wizard called me and I ended up writing three or four articles. But Matt ultimately wooed with a Love Boat’s Boat's Isaac and a Black Hole Bob both on the card in mint condition. That’s how we fell in love.
DRE:
Will we see a sketch that has a Scott Evil figure versus an Oz from Buffy figure?
SG:
One of the real tricks of the show is that you have authentic dispensable parodies to make some sort of social commentary with. We really don’t randomly have anything in there.
MS:
To give an idea. Tom and Doug’s action figures will probably appear tons more than Seth’s.
DRE:
The Transformers toys you used don’t look like real Transformers toys.
SG:
A lot of the stuff we have made or modified. For stuff to be animated you have to break it and wire it so it can move in ways they weren’t meant to. Sometimes we have to concede that the figure has limited poseability because it plays into the silliness.
MS:
We have a puppet department of about seven people that do nothing but wire armatures of bodies that we could put heads and arms onto.
SG:
We’ll also custom sculpt the likeness of someone like Former Secretary of Education Rod Page.
DRE:
Dana Plato spent all of her money on drugs and Seth you spent it on toys.
SG:
I really don’t spend a lot of money on them.
DRE:
On the Jimmy Kimmel show you said you had one that cost $1700.
SG:
The book price on that toy is $1700 but I didn’t pay that. That would be crazy. If you have $1700 to literally throw out the window, don’t spend it on a toy just throw it out the window. It would be easier to say that you threw it out the window rather than say you spent it on a Greatest American Hero box set.
DRE:
Seth, is this your chance to finally boss around [Family Guy creator] Seth MacFarlane?
SG:
[laughs] He’s great. You’re talking about one of the most brilliant and talented guys of our generation. I love the opportunity to work with him on Family Guy let alone having him come in and screw around on our show.
DRE:
How many new Family Guy episodes have you recorded so far?
SG:
I think we’re halfway through the fourth season and we got a pickup for the fifth so we’re really excited about it.
DRE:
Is the evil monkey in the closet back?
SG:
Yeah we’ve recorded two gags with him already.
DRE:
After you finish these 20 episodes of Robot Chicken do you hope to do more or even a feature film?
SG:
I don’t know. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it because first we want to get it out there and see how it does. I don’t think any of us would turn down the opportunity to do a second season but we’d have to modify the way it’s done. It’s an intense production so we have to figure out how to take breaks.
DRE:
What kinds of Standards and Practices issues are you bumping into?
SG:
It hasn’t been too bad. It’s mostly related to sex and violence.
DRE:
Have you done a major sex scene between two figures yet?
MS:
We have a great porn scene with popsicle sticks.
SG:
Yeah it’s a reenactment of Debbie Does Dallas. We also have something in either episode 13 or 14 that’s an example of scrambled porn.
DRE:
Are you going to have recurring characters?
SG:
We’ve done varying versions of the bloopers sketch three times over 20 episodes. That’s probably the only thing that’s really repeated.
MS:
There are a few characters you’ll see over and over again.
SG:
The character may not exactly be germane to the sketch but we just like seeing different puppets show up again.
DRE:
I heard that the name Robot Chicken came from some Chinese food menu.
SG:
Yeah we used to get takeout from this Chinese restaurant when we were writing the show so we used to order the Robot Chicken.
DRE:
What dish is the Robot Chicken?
SG:
It’s like a sweet and sour garlic chicken.
DRE:
You’ve got a lot of voices guest starring like Seth Macfarlane and then of course Abraham Benrubi.
SG:
We’ve had great success with voices. We also had Ryan Seacrest, Mark Hamill, Burt Reynolds and Dom DeLuise. We just had Phyllis Diller in also.
DRE:
Do they know exactly what they are doing in there?
SG:
No one gets made fun behind their back.
DRE:
How awesome was it getting Kurtwood Smith in there?
SG:
Kurtwood killed! He came on for The 70’s Show sketch then he also did one that was the further adventures of Walt Disney’s head.
MS:
He played a Lemming in a nature show parody.
DRE:
I saw a picture of a set with the Diff'rent Strokes characters. Will the real Conrad Bain do a voice?
SG:
He does as a puppet but since it was just three words we didn’t approach him. In a lot of cases, like when we did a Corey Feldman puppet, it is just a couple lines of dialogue so we won’t go to the real people.
DRE:
Matt, are you are still at the magazine?
MS:
Unfortunately I had to leave the magazine because it was too much work. But I just wrote a pilot for FOX. It’s a one hour drama that’s kind of like if The X-Files was run by the church.
DRE:
Seth, have you heard much about an Italian Job sequel yet?
SG:
There is nothing official yet. I heard there was a draft of the script that Paramount liked and it went [Italian Job director] Gary Gray. That was the last thing I heard.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
I hope a lot of you watched Robot Chicken when it premiered last Sunday. Robot Chicken is going to be the show that breaks Adult Swim to the mainstream. I loved the short sketches such as the Scarecrow getting knifed in the OZ sketch and also the longer sketches like the one where Optimus Prime gets colon cancer.
After the first Austin Powers we all knew that Seth Green was going to be a major creative force in Hollywood. But while he has gotten the chance to improvise in big budget movies like The Italian Job and Without a Paddle we have never seen him do something as the main creative force. But now he’s teamed up with a former editor of ToyFare magazine, Matthew Senreich, to write, direct, produce and lend his voice to Robot Chicken.
New episodes of Robot Chicken will air every Sunday at 11:30 pm on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim.
Check out the official website for Robot Chicken
Daniel Robert Epstein: I thought the first episode was fantastic and I’m not just blowing smoke up your asses.
Seth Green: There is already plenty of smoke up there. I’ve already had to open my mouth up real wide just to let some of the pressure out.
DRE:
Have you guys heard of SuicideGirls before?
SG:
Yeah I knew a girl that was involved with it for a while.
DRE:
So Matt when are we expecting the cease and desist order from [Wizard Magazine Publisher] Gareb Shamus [because of Twisted ToyFare Theatre]?
Matthew Senreich: [laughs] We are really amicable and I talk to those guys pretty much every day. They knew about it when we were doing it for Sony’s website.
DRE:
Was Twisted ToyFare Theatre an inspiration for Robot Chicken at all?
MS:
It’s kind of the reverse. Seth was going to go on Late Night with Conan O’Brien and he wanted to create an action/adventure piece with his toy and Conan O’Brien’s toy doing something stupid.
SG:
I wanted to do stop motion shorts in lieu of an interview.
MS:
Seth was a fan of Twisted ToyFare Theatre so he called me up and asked if me and a couple of other writers wanted to do it with him. As we were producing that first one Sony’s website Screenblast picked it up and wanted to do a few more.
DRE:
Seth I know that you get to improvise in a lot of the movies you work on but have you written screenplays that haven’t gotten produced?
SG:
Yeah I had a movie in development at Disney for two years which was a complete waste of time. It was just a miserable experience which kind of shied me away from producing. But then Matt and I were just planning to do this as an independent self financed project. We got the opportunity to produce it for the Sony site then the opportunity came up to do it for TV. It wasn’t something that we actively sought out but instead it just happened.
DRE:
The show must be a ton of work.
SG:
It is. Matt and I are in the office from 7 am to almost 10 pm every night. We’re just here all the time because we oversee every aspect of production. We’re doing the job, which is exhausting, but it’s also incredibly satisfying. It’s been incredibly rewarding to literally pull something out of nothing and have it get on TV.
DRE:
Seth you’re also a big movie star on top of all this. Is it taking time away from that or are you splitting time up?
SG:
Splitting it up isn’t a very good idea. I actually did a movie in the middle of our production and had to do all the work via remote patching whether it was by email or FedEx. It was a dumb thing to do because the pace is too exhausting to keep up. When I finished that I promised myself I wouldn’t do that again. I’m not going to be working on anything else while we’re doing this.
DRE:
I read that you are going to be doing 20 fifteen minute shows, is that true?
MS:
Yes.
SG:
Yeah we’re wrapping up the filming of the 16th and we’re recording for episodes 18 to 20 now.
DRE:
That’s a huge amount of episodes especially for Adult Swim.
MS:
We’ve been working on this for a while. We started writing back in July 2004 and we started production in September.
DRE:
I thought the whole show was going to be one note jokes but you have some pretty complex stuff in there sometimes.
SG:
One of things we try to do is give each episode three tent poles. The goal is to have three or four sketches that are a bit longer like one to four minutes long.
MS:
We have one eight minute sketch coming up later on.
SG:
It’s going to play as two parter over one episode.
MS:
We realized that the one to two minute sketches play out the best. It’s in and out then we’re on to the next thing.
DRE:
How do you two split up the duties?
MS:
We split them up a little bit but pretty much Seth, me and [head writers] Douglas Goldstein and Tom Root pretty much cover all the aspects. Everything from directing shots, calling agents to sitting with the editors.
SG:
It’s too much work for any one of us to do by ourselves so we really have to work as a cohesive team.
DRE:
The press release was kind of vague about how you two met, “Green and Senreich met through their mutual love of toys and action figures.” Did you meet at some convention?
SG:
It was a furry convention.
MS:
[laughs] When I was at Wizard I saw that Seth was a big action figure collector. So I called up his publicist and she said he would get back to me. A few minutes later Seth called and we just hit it off.
SG:
An editorial director from Wizard called me and I ended up writing three or four articles. But Matt ultimately wooed with a Love Boat’s Boat's Isaac and a Black Hole Bob both on the card in mint condition. That’s how we fell in love.
DRE:
Will we see a sketch that has a Scott Evil figure versus an Oz from Buffy figure?
SG:
One of the real tricks of the show is that you have authentic dispensable parodies to make some sort of social commentary with. We really don’t randomly have anything in there.
MS:
To give an idea. Tom and Doug’s action figures will probably appear tons more than Seth’s.
DRE:
The Transformers toys you used don’t look like real Transformers toys.
SG:
A lot of the stuff we have made or modified. For stuff to be animated you have to break it and wire it so it can move in ways they weren’t meant to. Sometimes we have to concede that the figure has limited poseability because it plays into the silliness.
MS:
We have a puppet department of about seven people that do nothing but wire armatures of bodies that we could put heads and arms onto.
SG:
We’ll also custom sculpt the likeness of someone like Former Secretary of Education Rod Page.
DRE:
Dana Plato spent all of her money on drugs and Seth you spent it on toys.
SG:
I really don’t spend a lot of money on them.
DRE:
On the Jimmy Kimmel show you said you had one that cost $1700.
SG:
The book price on that toy is $1700 but I didn’t pay that. That would be crazy. If you have $1700 to literally throw out the window, don’t spend it on a toy just throw it out the window. It would be easier to say that you threw it out the window rather than say you spent it on a Greatest American Hero box set.
DRE:
Seth, is this your chance to finally boss around [Family Guy creator] Seth MacFarlane?
SG:
[laughs] He’s great. You’re talking about one of the most brilliant and talented guys of our generation. I love the opportunity to work with him on Family Guy let alone having him come in and screw around on our show.
DRE:
How many new Family Guy episodes have you recorded so far?
SG:
I think we’re halfway through the fourth season and we got a pickup for the fifth so we’re really excited about it.
DRE:
Is the evil monkey in the closet back?
SG:
Yeah we’ve recorded two gags with him already.
DRE:
After you finish these 20 episodes of Robot Chicken do you hope to do more or even a feature film?
SG:
I don’t know. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it because first we want to get it out there and see how it does. I don’t think any of us would turn down the opportunity to do a second season but we’d have to modify the way it’s done. It’s an intense production so we have to figure out how to take breaks.
DRE:
What kinds of Standards and Practices issues are you bumping into?
SG:
It hasn’t been too bad. It’s mostly related to sex and violence.
DRE:
Have you done a major sex scene between two figures yet?
MS:
We have a great porn scene with popsicle sticks.
SG:
Yeah it’s a reenactment of Debbie Does Dallas. We also have something in either episode 13 or 14 that’s an example of scrambled porn.
DRE:
Are you going to have recurring characters?
SG:
We’ve done varying versions of the bloopers sketch three times over 20 episodes. That’s probably the only thing that’s really repeated.
MS:
There are a few characters you’ll see over and over again.
SG:
The character may not exactly be germane to the sketch but we just like seeing different puppets show up again.
DRE:
I heard that the name Robot Chicken came from some Chinese food menu.
SG:
Yeah we used to get takeout from this Chinese restaurant when we were writing the show so we used to order the Robot Chicken.
DRE:
What dish is the Robot Chicken?
SG:
It’s like a sweet and sour garlic chicken.
DRE:
You’ve got a lot of voices guest starring like Seth Macfarlane and then of course Abraham Benrubi.
SG:
We’ve had great success with voices. We also had Ryan Seacrest, Mark Hamill, Burt Reynolds and Dom DeLuise. We just had Phyllis Diller in also.
DRE:
Do they know exactly what they are doing in there?
SG:
No one gets made fun behind their back.
DRE:
How awesome was it getting Kurtwood Smith in there?
SG:
Kurtwood killed! He came on for The 70’s Show sketch then he also did one that was the further adventures of Walt Disney’s head.
MS:
He played a Lemming in a nature show parody.
DRE:
I saw a picture of a set with the Diff'rent Strokes characters. Will the real Conrad Bain do a voice?
SG:
He does as a puppet but since it was just three words we didn’t approach him. In a lot of cases, like when we did a Corey Feldman puppet, it is just a couple lines of dialogue so we won’t go to the real people.
DRE:
Matt, are you are still at the magazine?
MS:
Unfortunately I had to leave the magazine because it was too much work. But I just wrote a pilot for FOX. It’s a one hour drama that’s kind of like if The X-Files was run by the church.
DRE:
Seth, have you heard much about an Italian Job sequel yet?
SG:
There is nothing official yet. I heard there was a draft of the script that Paramount liked and it went [Italian Job director] Gary Gray. That was the last thing I heard.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
