‘Universal Basic Guys’ Creators Adam & Craig Malamut Share the Brotherly Love

What happens when you give a couple of overconfident yet lovable middle-aged men $3,000 a month to spend on whatever they’d like? Well, besides seeing a surplus in beer consumption, the possibilities are endless. Thanks to Universal Basic Guys, the brand new animated series coming to Fox’s Animation Domination on September 8, viewers will no longer have to wonder. 

Universal Basic Guys follows brothers Mark and Hank Hoagies, a pair of brothers who have been let go from their jobs thanks to the rise of automation at their local hot dog factory. But the Hoagies brothers are in luck, a newly installed basic income program is putting money into their pockets every month. With a new cash flow source and no job to worry about, the brothers soon find themselves on crazy adventures while searching for a purpose in life.   

Created by real-life brothers Adam and Craig Malamut, Universal Basic Guys is the duo’s latest project following the success of their popular series Game of Zones. Adam and Craig Malamut sat down with Bubbleblabber to discuss what they learned from Game of Zones, the level of detail inside the world of Universal Basic Guys, and the joy and harmony of working with your sibling 24/7… which obviously never leads to any fights or arguments. 

Matthew Swigonski: How much fun did you have creating Game of Zones and having that freedom just to develop your own universe?

Craig Malamut: It was an incredible experience. You don’t realize it at the time when you’re going through it. Because we were mostly just scared and didn’t know what to do at the beginning. We had designed it to be like a viral one-off video. Then Bleacher Report kept asking for more because it had done so well and we didn’t have any plans.

So we’re kind of just shooting from the hip when we were making these additional episodes. But as it went on, we just had this freedom to put it out and we were able to develop a connection with our fans because we would just read the comments immediately and then be writing our next episode.

Adam Malamut: I’ll just say that it was cool just how much NBA fans appreciated we always strived to make something better than people expected. A mashup of Game of Thrones and the NBA didn’t have to be that good, but we put a lot of care into it and the fans really noticed, so that was cool.

Matthew Swigonski: I feel like Mark and Hank would definitely be fans of Game of Zones. They’re certainly a couple of interesting characters. How long did it take to develop them and find their voice in the show?

Adam Malamut: Ah, that would definitely be a very meta episode if Mark and Hank get into uh Game of Zones. I would say that Mark and Hank existed pre-Game of Zones and Mark specifically was a voice that we had done for a long time and he was developed based on listening to all the sports radio growing up in Philadelphia. Just everyone calling up being like, What’s McNabb doing? He’s throwing at everybody’s feet. We gotta get Kevin Cobb in there,” and everyone thinking that they’re a genius. 

Craig Malamut: We’ve been developing Mark since like 2011. I was in college and Adam was trying to figure out something to do with this character and we were talking about it and we were like, “Maybe he creates a podcast?” We had so many versions of this show. We just knew we had a good character at the heart of it. Eventually, it became what it is now because we started finally developing it in 2020 into its final form.

Matthew Swigonski: Can you talk about how you developed the core concept behind Universal Basic Guys? 

Craig Malamut: I think we wanted to do a show where we could really just do anything. We didn’t want to have too many limitations. We were thinking, “Oh you know, what if Mark is on the spaceship going to Mars?” We wanted to be more in the camp of the South Park and The Simpsons shows of the world where it’s kind of a town and they can do whatever they want and comment on whatever they want.

And in 2020, Andrew Yang was running for president and everyone was talking about automation. He was talking about UBI and we were thinking that this could be one direction the future goes. At the very least we know people are going to be losing their jobs to automation more and more as the AI gets better and better. And so here’s this overconfident guy who thinks he’s way better at things than he actually is. And now he has the time and resources to put his money where his mouth is and try to do those things. So that was fun for us. 

So we would sit around and we would watch these videos on random things on YouTube and think that’d be fun to try, like bow hunting. And we’d just take this character of Mark and throw him into these situations. And the problems will arise when he crashes into reality.

Adam Malamut: Yeah, that’s what happens if you take a guy who thinks he’s an expert, so overconfident, “I’m doing this now. I’m doing this now!” Trying to find this meaning in his life and actually being able to do all this stuff he thinks he can do without the expertise.

Matthew Swigonski: You can see a lot of Peter Griffin or even Bob Belcher in a character like Mark. Now being on Fox and stepping into the shadow of Family Guy, Bob’s Burgers, and The Simpsons, do you feel like there’s pressure of trying to live up to those shows? Or are you more concerned about paving your own way? 

Adam Malamut: Yeah, that’s an interesting question. I certainly admire a lot of those shows. All the great characters that have been on Fox before and I think they’re super funny. I think we’re just trying to write our character with his unique voice and we want to make sure that he stays in his own lane. He’s not just like a generic dumb guy or he’s not just a drunk. It seemed wrong to be drunk.

Craig Malamut: Yeah, yeah. I would say that he moralizes everything. He justifies and always has theories about stuff and so we always try to write him in a way that he stays in his unique lane. Peter Griffin is great on Family Guy, he’s so funny. Homer Simpson is so great. Bob Belcher is great in his own lane and so we want to make sure that even though there are many superficial similarities between Mark and those characters, he has a specific voice. We’re a very character-driven show. It’s not as joke-dense as others, trying to throw jokes here and there. It’s really coming from characters and it’s very important to us to make sure that everything feels specific to Mark Hoagies.

Matthew Swigonski: Without really spoiling anything, what can fans expect throughout this upcoming first season?

Adam Malamut: I would say a couple of things. One thing we wanted to do was to make sure that this show is not much of an arc. You can jump in anywhere and watch any episode and I think what we’re going for is just very digestible fun. It’s an easy, classic comedy with guys doing stupid sort of things. Without spoiling anything, in each episode, Mark gets into something or tries something different. He tries to be a Navy SEAL, he tries maybe to go bow hunting, things like that. 

Craig Malamut: I think that basically sums it up. What is Mark gonna get into this month? What’s gonna be his obsession, you know? Just watching him have a half-baked idea and commit to it fully and things go wrong and he rationalizes that it’s not going that wrong. We had a lot of fun with the thought experiments of like, “What’s a fun thing you would get into if you were just sitting around at home and you had time to kill?”

Matthew Swigonski: Is there one episode that each of you is most excited about for people to see? 

Craig Malamut: Eh, it’s like choosing my favorite child. I really love our Jersey Devil episode. I think it’s got a great story about Mark and his stepson and trying to be a cool stepdad. It also just involves a really fun character that’s pulled from New Jersey mythology. And something that we learned about as kids, is the stories of the Jersey Devil and the Pine Barrens. And so it’s got a lot of local specificity. We try to make the Pine Barrens really feel like the Pine Barrens and sound like the Pine Barrens. We based the Jersey Devil character off of an actual drawing of the Jersey Devil from a 1910 local newspaper. It’s a terrible drawing of this awkward creature with tiny legs. There’s a horse on tiny legs with like tiny bad wings and a giant head.

Adam Malamut: There’s a handful that I really like. There’s one where Mark tries to fly a plane. That one is pretty funny. And there is the first episode that is going to be airing soon. I like it a lot because I think it has a little bit of everything. It has some unexpected heart, it’s funny and surprising. I think that episode is one I’m really proud of as well. 

Matthew Swigonski: So Craig, you kind of touched on the animation a bit. How long did it take to settle on that specific style of the show?

Craig Malamut: It was a process because first, we animated a sample short. We loosely based the style on this cartoon we did at Bleacher Report, called Sports Gods. That was much rougher.  After we had this 3-minute sample short, we sent that to our animation studio, which is in Australia, Princess Bento. They kind of took what we were going for and did a more professional pass on it. They just did what we were doing but better in a lot of ways. We wanted to keep in a few things that were important to us. We wanted to keep the style a little more grounded and make sure it felt like South Jersey and not just a generic cartoon town.

The movements of the characters as well. We wanted to make sure that they match the personalities of the characters. So Hank kind of moves sluggishly and slowly. He has very simple movements whereas Mark is more dynamic and energetic and more posing. So it was a lot of fun figuring out all of these details that you never really think about when you watch cartoons.

Adam Malamut: I would say that it’s an evolving process because we had this kind of Lo-Fi style that we do on a lot of our stuff. Obviously, Game of Zones is kind of its own thing. It was a nightmarish process because the characters are so hyper-realistic that it took anyone designing a head like three days to build.

It was insane. But for this one, we wanted to go back to like our Sports God style. And it’s a little bit of a challenge when you have artists who are so unbelievably talented and then there’s a style that’s so crude. And I think that it ended up in this middle ground of really polished animation and then our kind of crudeness that we like.  

I’m actually excited because for Season Two of Universal Basic Guy we brought in this animation director, Myke Chilian. He’s an amazingly talented guy and he’s helping to find that look. If you look at The Simpsons, the way it looks in Season One is very different from how it looks now. So I think this is something that is an evolving process as we mind meld with all the talented animators and try to find exactly what our look is.

It has a couple of things that look very classic and other things that are different, like, our line thickness. We have Lo-Fi background characters that we’ve kept. Some of the background characters look kind of derpy and simple. Uh, so that’s something we do differently. Occasionally they talk and you don’t expect it because they’re not built to talk. 

Craig Malamut: I do think the line work was something that we thought about. We wanted it to be heavier because we wanted this show to kind of look different from other adult animation.

Matthew Swigonski: Do you guys feel like you’re on the same page when it comes to generating ideas? Or do you feel like you bring something wildly different to the table? 

Adam Malamut: That’s another interesting question. I would say that Craig and I have a lot of the same tastes. We noticed that when we’re giving notes on a writer’s script that we’re on the same page a lot.

We had a lot of the same influences growing up so I’d say in many ways we’re similar. But I’d say we’re very different in our strengths. I’m more of a starter and Craig’s more of a finisher. Growing up I would just be like a clown, doing all sorts of dumb stuff and getting in trouble and making jokes and Craig would be like, “That was really funny, Adam. That was stupid.” He developed a taste for what was good and what was bad. So I’ll generate a lot of stuff and be all over the place and Craig is very good at knowing what is funny and what isn’t. So I think that dynamic has benefited our workflow. Craig can take things home and I can sometimes generate a lot of ideas. 

Craig Malamut: In terms of what we agree on… like 95% of everything. But then it’s like that five percent we’ll battle over and kill each other. At first, we didn’t realize how similar we were in everything that we wanted to do. Now when we talk it out and are collaborating with larger groups, it’s very clear how aligned Adam and I are in a lot of things

Adam Malamut: I wanted Mark Hoagies to have a beard and a shaved head and Craig was like, “No! He’s got a goatee and a little bit of hair.”

Craig Malamut: That was the original design. Also, it couldn’t look exactly like you, Adam. That would be a little weird.

Matthew Swigonski: How long did it take you guys to actually develop that relationship of working together? Did it take time or do you feel like you had a spark from the get-go?  

Craig Malamut: I think it’s been constantly evolving. 

Adam Malamut: I was literally gonna say the same.

Craig Malamut: Yeah, I think from the beginning of when we worked together. We obviously were able to produce stuff that was good enough for us to continue doing this. But we definitely fought a ton. Again in hindsight, it was really over minutia oftentimes. I do think that we’ve gotten more and more into a rhythm. Especially in the last couple of years working on the show because there’s so much work to do.

Adam Malamut: Yeah, I would say that we have some explosive fights over stuff, especially earlier when it was just the two of us working. That was a pressure cooker and we would go at it. I’d say now, that actually being in a big infrastructure like the big animation thing with Fox helps. We have so many people and so many different teams, there’s so much else to get done. We really feel like we’re on the same page. One thing that’s helpful in bonding is just the fact that things are so big now and we kind of have to be aligned on a lot of things and trust each other.