As one of the creators of the stop motion animated Robot Chicken, Matt Senreich is in a rare and privileged position – he gets to spend his adult life playing with toys, and getting paid to do it. Each episode of Robot Chicken is a quick and dirty pop culture mash-up – it’s the kind of show where Voltron might find himself in a dance battle, or Skeletor might have to deal with his foreclosure on his evil lair. It’s not that surprising to learn that Senreich’s love of action figures goes all the way back to childhood. “I had a lot of toys when I was a kid, although I don’t think I was anywhere near as dirty back then!” he says with a laugh. “I had every Star Wars figure I could find, and I’d be at Toys R Us every Tuesday morning when the new figures came out. I was a geek – I was very socially introverted. It wasn’t until well into my senior year of high school when I realised that interacting with people was as important as hanging out in my own mind.”
Senreich interned for Marvel Comics in his teens, and later on, after graduating college, found himself editing ToyFare, an action figure magazine. It was here where he met his friend and collaborator Seth Green, forming the bond that would lead to Robot Chicken. “I read that Seth was a huge action figure collector, and that he’d actually customised toys for the Buffy cast as a Christmas gift,” Senreich says. “I thought that would make a really interesting story for my magazine, so I contacted him, and immediately, we started geeking out on our love of toys. He told me about three figures he could never find – Bob from The Black Hole, Uncle Jesse from Dukes Of Hazzard and Isaac from The Love Boat, and so I went away and used my connections to find two of them. I essentially bribed him for his friendship, but luckily, it turned into this ridiculous, beautiful series.”
Robot Chicken, which Senreich and Green dreamed up after that initial meeting, has run for six seasons, with a seventh due to start early next year. Each episode lasts for ten or 12 minutes, but the stop motion animation process is so arduous that creating a season takes “around 14 months of the year”. The gruelling task begins in the writers room. “Our writing process is probably the most miserable experience ever,” Senreich laughs. “We have six writers in a dark and dingy room, who are required to write as many ideas as possible from 9am through to about 4pm. At 4pm, we print out everybody’s ideas then have a meeting where we vote on them. There are five of us who vote, and it has to be a three-to-two decision to get in, so it’s a gruelling process.”
Then, of course, the figures need to be created and shaped. Robot Chicken has a team of ten people who build, by Senreich’s estimation, around 120 puppets a week. “It’s our own mini toy factory,” he says, “and it’s tricky, because the puppets have to move in the very precise ways our animators need. Our animators are doing five-to-eight seconds of animation per day, moving these figures little by little, and trying to give them the life and personality they need.” Needless to say, there’s little room for things to go wrong. “You have one take to get it right, and kudos to the crew for doing that. We have a very close-knit crew. We always say that our animators are our actors – they have to give the performance of a lifetime on every take, because they only have one chance.”
Over six seasons and various specials, Robot Chicken has welcomed an incredible array of guest stars – almost everyone who’s anyone in the world of comedy has stopped by at some point. Picking a favourite would be difficult, but Senreich says that in general, it’s the more eccentric ones that get him really excited. “I was thrilled to have Burt Reynolds and Dom DeLuise come in at the same time,” he says. “That was a highlight for me. Likewise Pat Morita – I get more excited for people like that than the contemporary stars sometimes. When the younger guys come in, like Zac Efron, it’s great – he’s such a talented actor, and you sit there in awe of what he’s going to be able to do with his career – but it’s different. I’m intimidated by a lot of the older guys, because in a lot of cases, they’re my heroes.”
Robot Chicken have done several Star Wars specials over the year, and a short time ago, Green and Senreich announced a brand new collaboration – with the blessing of George Lucas, they would create a show called Star Wars: Detours, a comedic and non-canonical look at the lives of Han Solo, Boba Fett and the rest. They got to work on the show, and assembled an incredible voice cast, including Zachary Levi, Seth MacFarlane, Felicia Day, Donald Faison and Billy Dee Williams. Just as things were looking great, however, a bombshell dropped – Lucasfilm was bought out by Disney. With the prospect of a brand new Star Wars trilogy on the horizon, the prospect of an irreverent comedy series like Detours suddenly didn’t seem so assured.
“When the company got sold and they started talking about new movies, it started to seem like our comedic version of Star Wars might be competing with the upcoming movies as a means of introducing the series to younger people,” Senreich says. “There were a lot of conversations about what to do, and we held off, which I think is the right thing. That’s not to say it will never see the light of day.” It seems like a bummer, but he assures me that Detours will see the light of day at some point. “There are 39 episodes completely done, with an incredible cast and director,” he says. “When the time is right, it will be out there. I’m not sure when that will be, but we did an amazing thing and everyone was excited to be a part of it. It’s on hold for now, but people will see it eventually.”
Senreich and the rest of the Robot Chicken crew will be heading to Sydney soon, to bring the show to life as part of GRAPHIC. The program for the event has yet to be finalised – the guys, it’s fair to say, like to do a lot of things on the fly – but Senreich promises a fun spectacle. “We plan to show and do lots of silly things,” he says. “We literally start production two days before we get on the plane, but if anything’s worth showing, I’m going to put it on a thumb drive and bring it down. We have a couple of things to show down there – for instance, we’re working on a new show with Bryan Cranston, which is going to be great, so we’ll be showing a little of that.”
BY ALASDAIR DUNCAN
Robot Chicken Live presents at Sydney Opera House on Friday October 4 as part of the GRAPHIC Festival.
