Tony Tellado: Executive producer Simon has a challenge for the animated invincible, keeping the themes of the comic, but yet making the series its own thing. And this is Sci-Fi Talk, the podcast on how Sci-Fi fantasy horroring comics help us explore humanity.Simon Raccioppa Invincible
The first thing that stands out to me, if you could speak about this, is really kind of like the son dealing with the sins of the father kind of thing and how that's affected him and obviously affected him greatly. Was that always part of the plan for season two or did just kind of late in the game?
Simon Raccioppa: That's a really great question, Tony. So when we were writing season one, we always talked about the theme of season one being Mark wanting to become his father and then obviously learning the truth about his dad and realizing that that's not who we should be. Obviously, it's not what he wants. But that was his goal through the whole first episode, is, I want to be my dad. Oh, my God, my dad's not who I thought he was.
The theme of the second season is, wait, what if I become my dad anyway? How much control do I have to not become my father, given that I'm at btrumite and have human concern that Mark has with that, with power and the responsibility that comes with power? So, I mean, we were always discussing it early on. And then also part of that, too, is that whether he likes it or not, Nolan is his father. So therefore, when Nolan's, like, come to Thrxa, there's problems. The Viltruw rights coming. Mark is certainly feels partially responsible for that, even though he.
It's difficult for him to even recognize his father at that point. So, yeah, so those were always part of themes. I mean, they were in the original comics. We just tried to find ways to, like, maybe heighten them a little bit, to go a little more in depth, just because we have more time in the show.
I think another thing that, and it took me by surprise in the first episode, is the multiverse and the different iterations of things. That was really. That was bold. That was really bold for an animated feature. But then again, because it is animation, it's a lot easier to do.
It was live action. So how did that originate?
Again? That was in the original comics. That was in the original Robert Ktman comics. I mean, obviously, everybody's being doing, like, the multiverse has hit sort of this pop culture in nadir right now.
It sure has.
You know, it's everywhere. I mean, comic books have been doing it for decades earlier. You know, and Robert was doing it in invincible, you know, almost 15 years ago. So for us, it was just a natural part of Mark's story. I'd like to think that we do it.
Our multiverse is a little more character based. It all comes out of, like, a single character in our series as Angstrom. You know, Angstrom's power to go between universes and stuff, we don't, it doesn't really exist outside of him, outside of Angstrom. So for us, it's more of a character story, more of a character plot element, rather than us just being like, hey, let's just do a big multiverse. Because everyone's doing multiverses again.
You can look back at the original comics. It was there 15 years ago. So that's the multiverse wor just being like, everybody's doing it, so let's hop on that bandwagon.
There's also a new character that comes in to join the team, but as we saw, his background is a little iffy, so talk about him a little bit, and the actor that is supplying the voice.
So I assume you're talking about shape Smith. Yes, I. A lot of our characters have weird backstories and stuff like that, so they can help anyone. Yeah. Ben Schwartz play shape Smith.
I mean, Ben is incredible. I've loved Ben for Shapesmith , like, his role, his acting in Parks and Rec is one of my favorite characters ever. I think he's so great there, you know, and he's a huge friend of the show. We just thought he would be perfect to play Shapemith.
Shapesmith of being a martian, a little weird, you know, fish out of water on earth. We play off a lot of the comedy with shapsmith in our show. I mean, our show, obviously, we do have comedy. We have quite a bit of comedy, but we're also very dramatic. But shape Smith is a character who's a little more fun, a little more light heartted, and we just thought Ben was the perfect person to play that.
And then, of course, Ben brings in, I mean, Ben does improv comedy all the time. He does show, like, if you haven't seen one of his shows, I recommend when he tours the shows, they're so much fun, and everyone is completely unique because they're all're improv. He's excellent. So he brings comedy and new lines and new performances to the show that we don't even think about when we're writing the character. So he's just tremendous.
I'm so happy to have him on the show. Yeah. And he's not going anywhere.
So, you know, one thing I noticed, too, is that, and I really like this, and kind of a bold move is you're also showing, like, episodes devoted to one character, not necessarily part of the group. I mean, Seth Rogen's Allen the alien was. Is phenomenal. And he got. We saw him before season one, but now he really got his due a little more.
Yeah, exactly. And we wanna keep on doing that. We'd like to think that every character, even if we'd only show them for a few minutes on screen and any episode, has a complete backstory, has a past, have things they want, things they're afraid of, things, you know, you know, events that happened in their past that give them, you know, either benefits or trauma and everything like that. So a lot of times we want to show you those things when they're interesting. So, you know, Seth is a great example.
Seth is. Allen is a great example. I think you're going to be seeing more of that in season three, something we like to do and we want to keep on doing. I mean, it's just like we're trying to make every character as compelling as possible. And if they're a compelling character, they should be able to tell their own story for 40 minutes or so.
We always thank you for the compliment for the show, but, yeah, that means, hopefully, that the team is doing a good job creating compelling, interesting characters.
I would think one of the challenges is you're balancing the character, and it's so easy for, like, the violence to kind of overshadow that. So I guess you have to kind of walk a tightrope a little bit and not go too far in either direction.
Yeah, I would say the show, I mean, we're a lot of things, I think, invincible. We're sometimes really funny, sometimes hopefully we make you cry. We're really dramatic. We can be very violent. We can be very also just very conversational scenes in a kitchen.
So obviously, we try to do that all. But you're right, it's a balancing act for the violence. I would like to think, or at least the goal of the show, is to only have the violence for a reason. You know, we're not just gratuitously violent. I feel like we don't gratuitously swear either.
Like, we do those things. We use them when they feel correct for the situation. And honestly, if you have a Superman strength level character and he is crashing through a building and there's innocent people in that building, they're going to get hurt. So we're trying to just show you the realistic, grounded reality of our world. And in those cases, it's like if you get run over by a bulldozer, it's going to be a mess.
If you get hit by one of our characters who's super strong, it's going to be messy. And we're just trying to be true to that without being gratuitous about it.
Yeah. As you mentioned earlier in reference, it's part of the comic, too. And I'm so glad they didn't lose that because if they would have watered it down, I've seen so many series and animation where that's watered down and it just loses so much and it's like, that's not invincible anymore when that does that.
No. If anything, we water it up. I don't know if that's a word, but like, that's what we try to do.
Yeah, that's wild. Season three is going to happen.
Yes. Yeah. Well, that's public knowledge. Amazon, we were so lucky that after the success of season one, it was enough for Amazon to get behind us and greenl light season two and three simultaneously. So we've just been, we're making both seasons.
I mean, obviously season two'already done and airs. So season three, we're deep in production. All that, it's coming along amazing. I just can't wait to share it with people. I wish we could drop it today, but obviously we're not done.
But I can promise you the wait won't be as long as it was between one and two. Because, again, because Amazon was nice enough to just give us two seasons in a row, which meant the whole team could stay together and we could just roll from season two right onto what. But yeah, it's great. We have new casts, new stories. But again, everything that happened in one and two still carries weight.
And it's not a reset. Like, all the stuff that happens, like our characters are going to reflect upon the stuff that happened to them in the previous seasons. Terrible things are going to continue to have know, reverberate and, you know, resonate with our characters going forwards. We don't forget, we don't reset. We just continue forwards.
I like the fact that he also is like, juggling now, now being a college student, but being late to his own high school graduation because he's saving, he's, you know, doing his superhero things. So trying. I like the balance of something we don't see. You know, Clark Kent seems to pull it off, but the balance between the you know, the real life and then the superhero side, too. I appreciated that.
Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, I mean, that's something. I mean, we're not, obviously not the first to do that. I think Spider man twoidereah, Sam Raimi did such an amazing job.
So, you know, we're standing on the shoulders of Spider man, but what we try to do on the show is show you the other side of being a superhero. Right. Like, show you not just the regular life that our characters have. Because, you know, like, superman has to works at the bugle. He has to go to the job.
Right? Like, y. Does he cook dinner for himself? I don't know. Like, like. But those things happen. So we try to show you a bit more of that and, like, who our characters are when they're not saving the world, you know, when they're not out fighting supervillains.
Like, what does Rex bloge do on a Sunday afternoon if he's not on call? We want to show you that, show you and spend time on that side of our character lives as well, and we think that's important.
Yeah, absolutely. You know, I do like, and I'll talk about the voice cast in a moment. But the relationship now with his mother has changed because the father's no longer there. And there's some, she's venting her frustration a little bit about things. And I thought, I mean, Sandra is just killing it in that role as well as Steven, for that matter.
I mean, look, Sandra. Oh, like, God, I want to put her on screen every more minutes of every episode. Of course. She's amazing. She brings so much depth to Debbie and so many, so many ideas and just, like, a great actor's perspective to the character.
But, yeah, I mean, Debbie, she's like, she was married to Omni, man. She was married to Nolan for 20 years. So, of course this is going to affect her in a massive way. Of course she's going to have hard, difficult feelings. I mean, we've all had friends who have had a divorce or a longt time relationship breakup.
So we know, even if it's not ourselves, we know what, what a person goes through through those events. And we want to make sure that our characters, again, feel real. Like, this is going to take time for Debbie to work through this, if she ever does. And obviously, her breakup, like Nolan, is worse. I mean, no.
Murdered people. So imagine. Yeah, imagine the scenario where you were married to someone for 20 years, and it turns out that they're murderer. They're not. They lied to you for all these years.
About who they were, and they maybe didn't love you like they said they did. They were hiding aside from you. And then they also murdered people. Like, how do you get over that? That's not something you get over in two months. Maybe that's not something you get over in two years.
So we want to make sure that Debbie is true to that, because if she was just like, oh, that was terrible. Okay, back to life, you'd be like, this isn't real. This doesn't feel. Even in a world, superheroes and magic and mutants and animals and everything like that, you know, you would still be like, this feels fake. That would be the fakest thing about the show.
So we don't want to do that. We want to treat her like a real person.
Yeah. I mean, obviously, when she finds out that he has a low opinion of her, I mean, that was devastating for her. Ca becausee she obviously loved him. That was brutal. But, yeah, that was good drama, and I didn't expect that as much in a show like this, but I think that's one thing I've noticed this season.
There's more dramatic elements that I really am enjoying.
Yeah, well, thank you for that. That's a huge compliment to the team who made the show, all of us. I mean, I think you'll see more of that as the series goes further. Goes, sorry, forwards. Just simply because now we've got a whole season to build upon.
So now it's like, so season one was the drama of, like, before the show started, but obviously, there's no episodes to watch that. But now we're going back to drama. We have characters who are still being, again, being affected by things that happen in season one and season two. So all that stuff is bleeding together and just making more interesting dramatic situations for our characters.
How does it work as far as the animation? Obviously, the script are written and then is that sent to the animators or do you do, like, storyboards for them or that kind of thing?
Yeah, we have a whole production team here in Los Angeles. You know, we have really great. We have two supervising directors, Dan Duncan and Sean O'Neill, and they're, like, instrumental to the process and along with a whole bunch of other people, design and everything like that. So we write the scripts, think, you know, production reads, outlines and scripts along the way, and they have input on that because, of course, there's some things that are easier to animate than others, and they also have great, great feedback across the board. And then we do all the storyboarding, all the design work here, all the reports with our actors, that's all done here.
The editorial is done here, post production is done here. The actual animation is done overseas. So the actual. Dr. But you'd be surprised by how much.
And they're amazing partners, too, obviously, our overseas partners bring incredible creativity to the show as well. So it's really, it's an LA overseas and we use a couple different studios, which is why I'm not specifying overseas production. But it's like together it's a lot of back and forth between us and overseas to make this show.
I mean, that's really been the norm in animation now for years. I don'know, costs have a lot to do with it, know, of course. But yeah, there's definitely a synergy and, you know, occasionally it might even surprise you with some of the things they add that you didn't think were there.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, they're all, you know, everyone overseas are like equally creative, great, fantastic artists on their own. Right. So it's, again, it's this great back and forth. It's a partnership on the showip, I guess'the.
Best way to say.
Well, congratulations so far on the season. I haven't finished it yet, but I did binge on quite a few episodes when they came out. So I just have so many other things going on. But I definitely am going to finish it and see how this all goes. And we'll anxiously wait for season three before we do go.
I do want to commend you on the The Boys diabolical. We actually did, we did some press with you about that. I have to say, my favorite story is with the little girl. It was like, oh, my God. That it was funny and gory, but I loved every minute.
Oh, thank you so much. Yeah, there's got be the poster for it. I don'know, you can see up there behind me, but yeah. Thanks so much. That was great.
That was such a blast to do. Thank you for your support of the show. Yeah, I'd love to do more. Hopefully someday maybe we're talking to Amazon, maybe do a second season. That too, but it was a delight.
Yeah. Well, thank you. I hope you like the rest of season two. And yeah, I'm sure we'll talk really soon.
Look for both seasons of invincible on Amazon prime for Sci-Fi talk, this is Tony Toatto. Thanks for listening.
