Dallas & Robo Q&A: We Talk To The Creator Of Youtube Red’s Newest Adult Animated Series

How the hell does the director for 2018’s most technical animated series have time to create a second show that premieres only months later? Find out here.

 

While most will remember the series as a Saturday morning cartoon, the futuristic take on The Flintstones known as The Jetsons has the dubious distinction as being the first primetime series (animated or otherwise) broadcast in color for ABC. Home audiences were in awe with a decade where John F. Kennedy was hell-bent on sending someone to the moon while the Soviet Union was gobbling up all the press in terms of sending a man to orbit. Obviously, Star Trek, Space Odyssey 2001, and The Jetsons proved that America had a thirst for what the hell was in space and how can we get some taste of what we think life would be like. Probably of all the franchises that were produced by Hanna-Barbera during this time, The Jetsons featured the least amount of focus at the older-skewing audiences and instead focused more on the futuristic/sci-fi elements that would entertain kids for generations to come that would become more prevalent in the 1980s take on the series.

Not only did The Jetsons help usher in a bunch of sci-fun into the everyday American lexicon, the franchise proved a valid concept that TV networks certainly took advantage of in the future…if something works….COPY IT! A concept made famous by a future FOX network that would not only make sure that the American family animated sitcom was well-represented by having numerous franchises run with mold, but animated franchises could be spun-off as well. Numerous Hanna-Barbera franchises for the next few decades would either get rebooted, spun off, or in the case of The Jetsons, just be downright similar in most aspects of a predecessor, because familial tropes and premises resonated well with the viewing audience and the viewing audience responded well with repeat viewings.

Despite the constant comparisons in storylines, the characters of The Jetsons were a bit different than that of The Flintstones. Like Fred, “George Jetson” (originally voiced by George O’Hanlon) is the lone-breadwinner of the household, however his much younger wife “Jane” (voiced by Penny Singleton) is a bit more indicative of the upper-middle class in that she’s a bit more “spendy” with the budget, loving fashion and buying new crap that would eventually see her leaving most of her chores to a maid-robot “Rosie”. “Judy Jetson” (voiced by Janet Waldo) and “Elroy” (voiced by Daws Butler) were the main differentiators to The Flintstones in terms of the family structure. While in the original take on The Flintstones you had much younger children in Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm, Judy (age 16) and Elroy (age 6) could provide for topics and storylines emanating from school when it came to Elroy, and high school era social issues like boys,friends, and whatever else Judy would divulge in what was her probably bestest friend of all, her loyal diary “Didi”.

The setting of Orbit City, another very stark contrast with The Flintstones and Bedrock, proved to be the most exciting idea of the franchise. “Googie” inspired housing raised high into space with the only means of getting anywhere by small space shuttles. When George went to work, he had a computer named R.U.D.I. that talked to him, yes, a personal computer. Ideas in various episodes of the show would prove to be commonplace in American households decades later, especially with technology. By the new millennium, robots, smartwatches, video calls, and flatscreen TVs were commonplace, but in the 1960s, these ideas were way ahead of their time and featured prominently in The Jetsons.
Unfortunately, The Jetsons only lasted a single season in prime-time and wouldn’t return until years later as a Saturday morning cartoon in the mid-80s where the franchise would get the breadth of its notoriety.

 

Fast forward to today, adult animation has seen its fair share of winners and losers when combining the best of futuristic/space concepts with today’s sensibilities. Futurama would do this successfully, 1000 years in the future that constantly begged the question, is New York still New York? Rick and Morty is constantly fucking around with “butterfly effects” and time travel and interplanetary discovery. Final Space is a DEEP space animated series that combines comedy with drama the likes of which we haven’t seen on television before. A lot of that in regards to the latter had to do with the supervising direction by way of Mike Roberts who officially brings his own animated space comedy, Dallas & Robo.
The eight-episode buddy comedy follows sassy space trucker Dallas (Kat Dennings) and cowboy-hat-wearing-AI robot Robo (John Cena) as they try and make a few dollars in the seedy world of interplanetary big-rigging while navigating their way through cannibal bikers, rival space truckers and vending machine burritos.

“I have had always a fascination with Douglas Adams, and the Ricky Gervais Show, where you have two different ways to comment on an intellectual argument. Like if you’ve ever heard The Ricky Gervais Show, Ricky and Karl will comment on the same thing but from completely different takes. I wanted to create a setting that wasn’t 3000 years in the future, but rather I wanted to set the series 200 years in the future where we utilized ideas from present day that were repurposed for another age but with a buddy comedy dynamic with the commentary sensibilities of those shows. Ideas like bureaucracy and the fact that Mars has gas stations and that it was giving off a ghost town vibe that you’d see in the American Midwest. People are using nuclear engines to get around, but we have pills that cure cancer being caused by radiation. We find band-aid solutions for problems that we created which is very much what we see today it just happens to be in space. We try to purvey what it’s like being very human in space.”

The concept of Dallas & Robo has been around for several years. Roberts notes that ideas were being floated for shorts that would accompany the Comedy Central series TripTank where Mike would first meet with Matt Mariska (Code Monkeys) at Shadowmachine studios. The duo was responsible for a number of shorts series that were featured on the sketch show including Animal Hitman, Versus, and others with Dallas & Robo nearly joining the series. After two seasons, Comedy Central would cancel TripTank, but not before Mike would team up with both Mariska and Andy Sipes to develop the pilot for Dallas & Robo that eventually landed to Youtube Red as a series. That said, despite being the creator of the franchise, Mike Roberts had to make a choice, Dallas & Robo or Final Space, which had just been picked up to a ten episode first season for TBS and he was being tapped for the supervising director. Typically, Mike directs his work, however that wasn’t the case this time around, instead putting his faith in the fine producers at Shadowmachine to help bring Dallas & Robo to life, “It’s hard seeing your creation being tinkered with by someone else, but it came out just the way I would’ve done it.” Similarly, other than the development of the franchise up to and including the pilot, Mike left much of the writing up to Sipes and Mariska whom would also produce and showrun the series all the while building out the staff that would help Dallas & Robo come to fruition, “with Final Space, I had the opportunity to learn something new by melding the worlds of Chris Nolan with Family Guy, but Shadowmachine definitely didn’t go with a “B-team” when it came to Dallas & Robo and we were very fortunate to have some of the producers that ended up joining the project.”

Director Mike Roberts started as a classically trained animator and storyboard artist in Toronto but he now lives and works in LA on franchises like Final Space and Bojack Horseman, with Dallas & Robo being his most personal work to date in terms of inspiration. For starters, the premise of the series harkens back to Roberts’ love of popular franchises like Smokey & the Bandits, Star Wars, and as such Dallas & Robo is the result of that melding. The character of “Robo” is said to be a 900lb warrior poet but “Dallas”, as it pertains to her boisterous personality, is very much inspired by his wife, “whenever we go to a party, she likes to find the couple that’s there on their first date and ask when they are going to have babies. It’s hilarious, but it’s slightly embarrassing (laughs)”. It’s these different personalities that Dallas & Robo works off of, two characters with wildly different personalities that constantly clash over the course of eight episodes that lends itself to an exciting arc that Roberts says is meant to come to a definitive end much in the same light as The Simpsons do every episode, less procedural, more episodic, just drawn out over seasons rather than individual 23-minute episodes. Robo is trying to come to grips with the fact that he’s the last of his kind and that his independence is reliant on his space trucking job with Dallas, “the characters grow apart over the course of the season but eventually come back together stronger and ready for additional challenges.”

Yes, Mike is ready for the second season of Dallas & Robo already, and from the sounds of it, this is the cast he wants to go to war with, “we got spoiled with this cast”. The marquee name for Dallas & Robo, John Cena as “Robo”. It’s probably the reason why the show got picked up, and it’s even more probably the reason why the show is premiering on Youtube Red’s WWE channel and not on WWE Network (which has several animated series with John Cena in them already, most recently the second season of Camp WWE). “There was definitely a time where I was like, do we have the guy because he’s the best fit for the role of “Robo” or do we cast him because he’s such a big star? Fortunately, we got both because I can’t imagine anyone else voicing “Robo”.” The rest of the cast is just as impressive, Kat Dennings (Thor) voices “Dallas” and the recurring and guest cast is just as good with notables such as Nat Faxon, Jane Lynch, Taran Killam, Stephen Root, Dana Snyder, and a slew of others dotting the credits which apparently was an idea encouraged by Youtube while producing the series, “Youtube was adamant that every single person was the right person for the job, for example, John Cena believed in everything we did when he came on board and couldn’t wait to be a part of it.”

These trademarks are important. Mike Roberts has been a part of the early days of Netflix when he was on BoJack Horseman staff at a time when the streaming service was hardly known for original content. A parallel to what Youtube Red is doing now is clearly evident, but we are in a far busier and affluent adult animation boom that dwarfs the days of early Netflix which begs for maturation and experimentation, “the great thing about animation is that you can go Western, you can go sci-fi, you don’t have to be stuck with animated familial archetypes, and you have to now because the playing field is more crowded so we’re all trying to make the best thing and differentiate ourselves from the pack.”

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Viewers can binge all episodes of Dallas & Robo, the animated comedy starring John Cena and Kat Dennings, and from the award-winning production company behind “Bojack Horseman,” on the WWE YouTube channel.This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.
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