Stephan Franck’s Palomino

Stephan Franck: You know, he’s this uh PI, you know, who just works on this shoestring budget and, and, you know, it’s really fun, you know, and working on cases that are clearly underemploying his detective talents, you know, um, and work as a working musician, you know, working 6 nights a week at the pound, you know, and between those two things, he has a life that is Kind of acceptable that he for him uh uh uh because, you know, but that feels like it’s what he needs right now for the sake of his, his family, uh, but of course then the, the kid, the Eileen Wilcox, the murder case comes into their lives and you know, that’s a case that hits too close to home. And the funny thing is that through a chance encounter.Not only, you know, uh, so, so basically both father and daughter get entangled into that case. Eddie because the husband, you know, who’s afraid that he’s going to be the chief suspect, you know, and who’s a famous TV actor, you know, but still, you know, feels like. OK, yeah, I’m just a TV actor, you know, they can get rid of me just like that, you know, and, um, so he asked Eddie for help, which Eddie originally refuses because like I said, he doesn’t want to get in, you know, messed, you know, entangled into that type of cases.But also Eileen on the morning of her disappearance kind of crossed paths and this kind of hilarious interaction with Lisette and her friend Kelly who were like just out in the, you know, on the trail kind of cutting school somehow they get like quantum. Entangled, if you will, not literally, but you know their destiny forever now get linked. So both father and daughter are linked to through this case, and both of them are going to try to work their angles and uh and the fun structure of the series is that one book 123 takes place in 1981 when the dad has the lead because as cool as Lisette is, she’s a kid, so how much agency can she have? And then  she takes the lead in the investigation because she’s now 29 and she has the full hours of an adult plus the baggage that she’s recruited in between. So she’s a really, if you love her as a kid as an adult, she’s really, really amazing as a character and then she’s going to close that case or die trying. Wow, that’s interesting to do uh a time jump like that.

Tony Tellado:  Got to talk about What If, man, what a great series Marvel had and uh congratulations for that.That must have been fun to do, to do all these different versions of characters we know and love and kind of in some cases meshing them up a little bit.What  was it like to work on that ?

Stephan Franck: It was amazing. I mean, like, for one thing, you know, uh, you know, obviously, I mean, I’ve been a Marvel fan since I was like 8 or 9 years old, you know, so, yeah, right, so, so the idea that I would one day get to guide their, those characters’ destinies a little bit and, and, you know, you know, it was absolutely amazing, um, but what’s really what I really love about What If is that um The concept is not to do a different version of a character. The concept is to take this character which is the same character you already know and love or know and hate and love to hate or which in whichever case, right? But it’s this person that we know. Uh, and but we’re putting them in this other universe where like there’s a different set of lived experiences.And so what it does is it keeps exploring the same character by stress testing them through other situations that they did not get to experience in there in the universe that you’re familiar with. So, so that that’s, that’s really such a deep expression of these characters. It’s, I just, it’s amazing.

Chadwick’s Bozeman’s animated Black  Panther

To do their voices of their characters, which was fantastic. If I have a favorite though, because he’s no longer with us, it turned out to be the last role of Chadwick Boseman in Marvel. So the fact that he came back, he was obviously not well, and he still came back and did that was just amazing and I loved what he did with Black Panther for this. It was great. What, what I think is really incredible is that um how Fully, fully committed.Yeah, you, you may have, you would think that he would have had other things on his mind at that moment, you know, but no, he was fully, fully committed to the, to the, to the role and and just, just give us some things just absolutely incredible and uh um. And we didn’t know that he was ill, you know, and so, I mean, we’re taken by surprise just like everybody else, you know, and uh um.Um, but the thing is that as the universe would have it, just when he passed is just as his scenes were starting to be animated. So and I just remember like when we watched the first animated scenes of his character with the, with the execs, um. And it was, you know, obviously extremely, uh, I mean, there’s everybody was crying, you know, it was just a very, um.
You know, uh, and so, so yeah, so I think it was obviously a lot of pressure for the animator, the poor animator who went to animate this scene knowing that this was a moment that, you know, meant a lot to so many people, you know, um. So yeah, so it was, it was one of those uh things where life and art sort of come together and it’s very, uh, you know, you you you.