ROBOT CHICKEN: Series Co-Creator Seth Green Discusses The Animation And Playing With Toys For A Living

Adult Swim has always been known for creating more mature content that is always guaranteed to have a cult following behind it and last for much longer than its actual runtime. From Metalocalypse to Tim and Eric's Awesome Show, the programming block has always been on the bleeding edge of comedy. 

One of the longest-running and most iconic shows in Adult Swim has been Robot Chicken. A stop-motion comedy sketch show that pokes fun at pop culture is a series for the fans and made by the fans. The creators, Seth Green (Austin Powers) and Matthew Senreich, have been working on the show for ten seasons and almost 20 episodes!

Since its premiere episodes, Robot Chicken has touched every facet of popular culture, even including a DC Comics special, Star Wars, and The Walking Dead! With nerd culture being more prominent than ever before, the series has found its stride and shows no signs of stopping. 

Recently, over at Comic Book Movie, one of our interviewers was able to catch up with co-creator Seth Green to ask some questions about the world of animation and developing a show like Robot Chicken. Make sure to see what he had to say below, and don't forget to check out the audio component at the bottom!

Joe: Hey Seth, thanks so much for chatting with me, it's an honor. Even though you're one of the biggest names in adult animation today your career actually began with live-action roles, so did you always know you wanted to transition into this genre of television production?

Seth Green: (Laughs) That's so funny, no. I have never thought about entertainment as a segregated opportunity. I've always seen throughout my career performers diversify their expression across all mediums and I started as a kid and a part of what drew me to entertaining and performing was a love of character interpretation.

Being able to mimic voices or adjust the sound of my voice to represent all kinds of things, that's always been a favorite thing of mine. I got to do a ton of voice-overs as a young kid. I did a lot of commercials and animated stuff. So that as an expression has always been something that is really organic to me.

I also don't want to imply that by putting so much emphasis on voice-over performance that I've got a lack of interest in continuing to do on-camera performing. I'm most attracted to roles or projects that I make all my decisions based on what I'm going to play and what people will be a part of it that I can collaborate with.

Joe: You were involved in everything from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to the Austin Powers movies. Do you think that having experience in so many different franchises helps with your versatility when it comes to tackling different things on Robot Chicken?

Seth Green: Absolutely. You only know what you know, right? And you can only learn what you experience and what you witness or what you're told. And so by being lucky enough to be in so many high-profile things and such a variety of genres has given me a basic familiarity enough to speak to them in a way that's not offensive. (Laughs)

Joe: Robot Chicken is all about playing with toys, which has to be one of the coolest jobs. I'm curious to know what sort of toys you played with when you were a kid?

Seth Green: I played with blocks, legos, fisher price toys, and all of it, you know? As I got older I got really into Star Wars and Transformers. You can probably look at the first season of Robot Chicken and presume that most if not all of the things that were on it were my most juvenile passions.

Joe: Were any of them your own personal toys and action figures?

Seth Green: When we made the webisodes back in 2000 and the internet didn't exist in the same way it was so impossible to source things that everybody that worked on the show sacrificed some of their own personal stuff to make the show. I always joke that this was our wartime and we were giving to the cause. (Laughs)

Once we got into our first real season in 2004 for Adult Swim we had different access via the internet to communicate with people and source things from other places and we had a little bit more of a budget to shop around and get the stuff that we needed.

Joe: The popularity of nerd culture has definitely skyrocketed in recent years and over the last decade. Do you feel like your job gets any easier the more the public latches on to these growing fanbases?

Seth Green: I haven't thought about it with respect to ease but I have definitely been in those conversations with friends and collaborators that bemoan the growing popularity of any of our formerly private musings, I just remind them that we've won, and all of the things that we got our asses kicked for celebrating and loving when we were younger, our kids will probably reject outright because its the mass popular love of their parent.

But on the other hand, I've had to scour the internet for people who love Star Wars and things the way I do, and now those things are the most profitable intellectual properties across all of pop culture. Who could imagine that the story of Thanos and the Infinity Gauntlet would become the highest-grossing film of all time? If you had told me that when I was a teenager reading those stories, it just seemed impossible.

I guess it has made our job easier in the sense that a wider swath of the audience is interested in this type of content than ever was when we first came on the air.

If you're interested in hearing more about what Seth Green had to say, tune in to LiteraryJoe's Inner Child Podcast below! Also, don't forget to share your thoughts on the above excerpt in the usual spot!

Taken to a futuristic laboratory, the Robot Chicken is taken out of suspended animation by a masked scientist, revealed to be a descendant of the mad scientist who first reanimated the Robot Chicken.