'SuperMansion' Creators on Their Halloween Special and Robot Chicken [Interview]
SuperMansion season 3 won't arrive until next year, but you can get a taste of one new episode with the Halloween special SuperMansion: Drag Me To Halloween now available to stream on Crackle. SuperMansion creators Matthew Senreich and Zeb Wells spoke with /Film about the special, upcoming season, and Robot Chicken.Robot Chicken also has a Halloween special, Robot Chicken: Look Who's Walking, a Walking Dead spoof premiering October 8 at midnight on Adult Swim. Season 9 of Robot Chicken will premiere this year.What is the story of Drag Me To Halloween?Zeb Wells: I think Rex, the leader of the League, hates Halloween, he hates supernatural things. He thinks the world of these superheroes is weird enough. He doesn't need Halloween on top of it. So he just wants everyone to stay at home, but the rest of the League refuses to stay at home so they each go off and have their little vignettes that are based on genres of horror movies. There's romantic horror, like a gothic romance that's going on. There's an Exorcist-like story going on. There's a big Halloween party. Every character experiences Halloween in a different way.Matthew Senreich: What I like about it is it's also these superhero characters doing the normal stuff any of us would do on Halloween. One of the characters just wants to go trick or treating. One of the characters just wants to go to a college type party and find a girl. He encounters his most hated villain there also trying to find a girl. We're bringing it back to normal reality with these superhero characters.Do we get to see all the SuperMansion characters in Halloween costumes?
Wells: Most of them, yes. Not all but at the Halloween party, you're going to see a lot of costumes. The costume department hated us for this because they had to do a lot of costumes quickly.
Famous costumes or non licensed ones?Wells: They're non-licensed, non actionable costumes for sure.Senreich: But also, you have to remember, our superheroes wear costumes all year round so maybe they're just dressing as their superhero self, just going, "Look at how awesome I'm doing making this superhero costume," pretending not to be the superhero at a party.What's coming up for season three?Wells: A lot of fun stuff. I'm working on the second part of it right now so I'm having trouble remembering the first.Senreich: It's about Portia a little bit. There's a relationship thing. I think the most important thing is it's the dynamic between our main hero, Rex, with his daughter Lex and having to bring that back together, and the fact that it's like My Two Dads where she had a different father who raised her who is an arch villain who is now becoming a hero in this world's eyes, all of a sudden, by saving a hero at the end of last season. It's how villains have to become heroes in this world and what's that like.Wells: Our biggest supervillain team now is living with the superhero team. The fun of the beginning of this season is seeing those two teams interact and trying to make it work with even more roommates, roommates that might've been trying to kill you a couple months ago.What's coming up on Robot Chicken?Senreich: Season 9 is in full force. We're excited about our Walking Dead special. We had Robert Kirkman and Scott Gimple, the show runner, in the writers room with us having a good time just trying to twist that on its side.Was there anything they said you couldn't do to The Walking Dead?Senreich: Oddly, they actually wanted us to do more of the stuff that we weren't necessarily thinking was worth doing. They pushed the envelope for us which we didn't mind. All the actors that came in, they're funny people. These people know how to be comedians. Andrew Lincoln, you forget he did a lot of stuff beyond just Walking Dead. He can play it up a bit. Probably the central focus of this is Carl, the Carl character.Did you go all the way back to the first season with Shane and Lori?Senreich: Yeah, Jon Bernthal came in, Sarah's in it. We went way back to the first season all the way through the most relevant stuff of todayIn season nine, do you have recent things like Wonder Woman or the Netflix Marvel shows?Senreich: That's a good question. We do have a little bit with The Defenders people this season. The problem is we start writing so long ago, so our writing I think stopped in May-ish. Anything after May may not be as tacked onto this season but we got back into some of our Star Wars roots if you will.So Rogue One?Senreich: I will just say all Star Wars. We have a few sketches about all different Star Wars stuff. And we're all over the map. We're pop culture and just making fun of any of it. We had already seen Rogue One. As long as it was before May of this year it was fair game for us.Is there any Trump stuff on Robot Chicken?Senreich: [Laughs] Um, yes. [Laughs] Yeah, there'll be a little bit.