Dave Willis: It’s interesting. Matt and I didn’t meet until we worked together over here, but when I was in college, Matt was filming Hellraiser III on my campus. We never met, but they were busy blowing up the new student life building or the business administration building or something.

Matt Maiellaro: I worked on Hellraiser III, Children of the Corn 2, Basketcase 3…I sort of sought out the pictures and got myself a job on them. I was a big horror fan growing up.

DW: Matt helped start Space Ghost. I came into that in the middle. I worked on a Cartoon Network shoot, and they hooked me up with Andy Merrill, who is the voice of Brak and was a Space Ghost producer in the early years and throughout a big chunk of the ’90s. But I sent him a letter. My sister’s a Special Ed teacher, so she had one of her students copy a letter I wrote. It basically says “Dear Sirs. My name is Robert. I am 8. I recommend Dave Willis without reservation. He’s a fine, upstanding…” and then there’s a picture of a car and then “Love, Robert.” I got hired off that and worked my way up. It’s weird. I’d just gotten hired, and Matt had just quit three weeks earlier to do some movie stuff in L.A., and then he came back…So I’d been working on Space Ghost from ‘96 to ‘98, and then Matt came back to write for it, so we started working together…We’d just written this Space Ghost Coast To Coast script…

MM: Space Ghost had gone to a fast food restaurant and he’d ordered a ton of food. He didn’t have the money to pay for it, so in lieu of money, the burger chain said: “We’re going to put our mascots on your show.â€? That was going to be Master Shake, Meatwad and Frylock, and they were gonna just sort of hijack the show.

So that’s how Aqua Teen Hunger Force was born?

DW: I think it showed maybe how bored we were with Space Ghost and Zorak that these fast-food characters came in and sort of took over the show. It never got made, because there wasn’t enough Space Ghost in there, and Master Shake and Meatwad and Frylock just took it over completely. We always liked that script. It seemed like it dawned on us a couple of months later that it’d be a cool show on its own.

MM: You don’t see this in the show as a whole, but in the process of coming up with the show, there was an idea that maybe they were corporate mascots that a life of their own. That’s not even part of the show, but I think that was part of the thought process.

DW: In the beginning, we had to throw a detective angle onto it. The network kind of wanted that. “What do they do?� “I don’t know, they just kind of hang out.�

MM: It was like pitching to a brick wall.

How did Aqua Teen develop once the pitch was accepted?

DW: I think we did everything wrong in the beginning, but we believed in the idea, and they gave us enough rope to see if we could pull it off.

MM: The first season was one show. It took an entire year to develop, animate and put one show together. And it aired like Dec. 31, at 1 a.m., so it would hit that year’s budget. We totally did it the wrong way. We had come from producing Space Ghost, so we figured, well, that’ll be an easy way to do this show, and of course it was exactly the wrong way to do it. We learned a lot of expensive lessons.

DW: We had already started the second one before the first one was done, to ensure that we got picked up. We took it upon ourselves to record number two, and I remember our boss Mike was like: “You did what?! I haven’t even seen number one yet!â€?

MM: But they gave us the money to do it, so at the end of the day, they must have believed in it and believed in us. But it was really awkward. It called upon qualities that neither one of us has in spades, to kind of sell yourself and sell this product. It’s a lot easier just to do it.

What has your experience been working for Adult Swim?

DW: I think we’re pretty blessed.

MM: There’s not a lot of great comedy out there on TV. With this stuff, if it’s not funny, at least it’s weird and unexpected. Maybe we’re not successful every time out of the gate, but at least we try to do something completely different. Most of network television is so homogenized by the time it’s reached the air. There are few hurdles we have to clear before getting something on the air. Once we write it and put it together, that’s about it… We get to do things nobody else would let us do. I wrote a spec for Third Rock From the Sun, and they just look at it like: “There’s no way, it’s too bizarre, the kind of things you do.” Everybody else out there is scared, they’re spending so much money that they want to make sure your idea fits this template that’s been working forever. Over here, we get to come up with crazy ideas. Food items have a show. We do have more freedom here. You can feel it. It’s not like we’re making it in a basement for eight other people. It’s definitely a business, with a business model and ad sales and all that. But to make an analogy, I keep hearing it’s like roulette. Instead of putting all your chips on one thing, it’s all about spreading out the chips. These shows have such small budgets. As a viewer, if a 15-minute show sucks, just stick around. There’ll be something else on soon. No one else is making these short shows out there that I can think of.

DW: We were using this editor from LA on this one show, and he was talking to us about the third act, and we were like: “What, the last 90 seconds?â€? People talk about trying to end on a cliffhanger, but we’ve gotten to a point where we just instinctively go to a non sequitur and that just wraps it up. If we went to half an hour, we’d actually have to have…

MM: An outline.

DW: Yeah, we’d actually have to outline stuff.

Can you please talk a little bit more about your creative process?

DW: We get together on a Monday, crank out the script, maybe get together on a weekend to write and rewrite. We tend to not invest too much time in it. We record on a Friday, not really word for word, just mess around with it. Then give to an editor who messes with it for a couple of weeks, sort of an audio cut. After that, we’ll look at it, Matt and I, and give suggestions and make changes, since we’ve got to write the next week, it takes about six weeks, and they work on it on their own. They’ll put a rough picture to it, using Photoshop, and basically make an anamatic. Then we’ll send it to these guys down the street who spend three weeks or so giving it all the animation. Then we’ll spend a few days with another guy, adding sound effects and music, and then we’re done…We pitch in with voices whenever we can because it’s too hard to audition and hire and direct. It’s a lot easier to just do it yourself…The guy who’s the main voice of Master Shake, Dana Snyder, is really really talented, and helped us take that character in a totally different direction. We try to encourage as much improvisation inside the studio as possible. But the story stays the same, and the lines for the most part stay the same; they just get tweaked and made more real.

In conclusion, how would you describe Aqua Teen Hunger Force?

MM: They just hang out, and stuff happens to them. It’s sort of like ‘Three’s Company’ on acid.

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Like all my pals, the TV and movie people have come calling and even the computer game people (which is weird because games are for pedos and I have no interest).

A tongue in cheek comment, to be certain, but one that was totally out of left field and without any sort of grounding in the interview itself. It went unnoticed for a short while, until video game site Kotaku picked up on it. Then the shizznit hit the fizzan.

Wait, a guy who writes comic books for a living is saying that games are for pedophiles? I think tipster Neal put it best: What a jackass, especially coming from someone who works in an industry that is often geared toward a young market. What is this, Comic Industry Stupidity Day?

I did note that the phrase was in parentheses, but judging by their use throughout the interview it appears they are meant to denote asides Miller said.

Then the commenters get into the action!

That’s pretty good lulz coming from a guy who writes about muscle men in short shorts as though it actually means something. The Marvel universe has been a hot, overlarge turd for a long long while now and all Civil War did was break the turd open and mush it up a bit, and if you think dogshit smells bad when it’s just sitting there on the road, then try *stepping* in it. So while games might be for pedos, at least we’re not, y’know, scat-fanciers.

Tony Stark tried to touch me where my bathing suit covers.

I’d like to personally kick MM in the balls for wasting 10 months of my life and hundreds of dollars on that Civil War bullshit.

Hey Mark, I don’t want to write comics because they take it up the pooper.
Asshole. I don’t care if he was joking. Civil Wars has fucked up the Marvel Universe for years to come.

*Spoiler*

Cap in Jail? Who the fuck in their right mind would conclude a series like that?

It’s Mark Millar, he’ll say *anything* to get himself some publicity.

Of course, some posters understood that Millar was simply maing a joke, albeit a stupid one, but the damage was done – instead of reaching out again to fans of an industry that spend money comic book companies would kill to get even a piece of, Millar crapped all over himself and laughed while doing it. Kudos!

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You can catch a short preview from the episode online here.

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Stan does seem to be in an odd mood during the interview though. At one point, describes how he wakes up in the morning in a somewhat melancholy tone.

“…What do I think I can sell today? If nobody is looking for a story, and I have no reason to write a story, I would reallly much rather do anything else because it’s no fun writing stories, particularly. Not for me. I just do it in order to sell ‘em and make a couple of bucks.”

This throws the interviewer who tries her best to bring the mood back up, asking if Lee really has to work or if there’s still a level of joy he gets from it. Stan seems to snap out of it and back-pedals with “It’s fun to stay in the game.”

Listen for yourself.

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CS: Any chance you might direct a sequel to “Freddy vs. Jason” if New Line decides to do one?
Yu: Yeah, they’ve been talking about it, and they even talk about bringing Ash [from Sam Raimi's "Evil Dead" movies] into the equation, and I thought it’s terrific. It’s almost like an updated version of “The Good, The Bad and the Ugly.” If they really want to do it and they want me to do it, I’d love to do it. It would be a lot of fun.

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The obvious tragedy of Reeves was his relatively early death. The film questions whether it was indeed suicide or murder, but up until then, Reeves was so despondent that his career went the way of popcorn, he seemed like he could have used a telephone hotline.

“There is a line where George Reeves says, ‘It should’ve been enough for life’ [regarding] what he had. To me it’s about the condition of humanity whereby it’s never really enough. It’s that feeling, that ambition that drives you to achieve and for people to invent rockets and to build machines and the industrial age. It also keeps us perpetually kind of dissatisfied, that sort of grass is greener thing. Those things that at propel us at the same time frustrate us and stifle us in trying to live and manage those two things. It’s really that contradiction and the contradictory impulses that are universally human that I believe everyone can understand and that are really painful. It’s like in life us going, ‘If I just had this then I would be happy.’ And then finding out that that’s not really the thing, and I think that’s really what’s at the root of it all for me and I think that it really kind of transcends Hollywood even though it is a really good example of that kind of thing because it is to the extreme.â€?

Full article here.

Trailer here, featurette here.

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But over the past few weekends there’s been a shift. Paramount’s goons have taken control of the situation by pouring a wad of cash into it, and suddenly everything’s coming up roses. For instance, go to the once fan populated message board of Transformers producer Don Murphy… and you’ll find nothing but popcorn and bubblegum for the film where outrage, disappointment, and calls for boycott once stood.

There’s a reason for that. The dissenting voices have been banned and beaten down with threats.

Surf around the internet to those movie sites that were once critical of the film, and in place of their hard hitting reports about how Paramount might be screwing up, you’ll find set reports praising the film for being “faithful” and lauding the very things about the film they’d trashed only a few weeks before. It’s easy to be positive when you get an all expenses paid vacation to a movie set I guess. I’m not sure I wouldn’t have been lured in by it myself. But let’s not blame this all on set visits. For some of these offenders the ass-kissing began when they got their first call from Paramount weeks ago. It’s only culimated in this.

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