“Robot Chicken” was not the first stop-motion comedy show to feature commercial toys for sketches, but the show has now lasted longer than anyone involved with it could have ever anticipated. For co-creator Seth Green, the original impetus for what would become “Robot Chicken” was a rather simple desire.
“We didn’t set out to make a show, and especially weren’t intending to make a show that was going to last a long time,” Green told IndieWire ahead of the 20th anniversary of the Adult Swim animated sketch comedy show. “My partner Matt Senreich and I were trying to figure out how to make just animated sketch comedy shorts using toys. I thought that was really fun.” Twenty years later, and “Robot Chicken” is still popular. It has over 200 episodes, has parodied everything from “Sesame Street” and “He-Man” to “Star Wars” and “Pokémon,” and earned two Annie Awards and six Emmys.
The world looks very different from when “Robot Chicken” started in terms of the state of pop culture and parodies, but also the state of stop-motion as an art form and the technology available to make it. When the show began, there had just been a big advancement in a device that allowed animators to look at the sequence of frames they had just shot in real-time, toggling back a couple of frames so you could have a symmetry of action. At that time, “Robot Chicken” was produced by ShadowMachine (the studio that would go on to make Guillermo del Toro’s Oscar-winning “Pinocchio”) before eventually switching to an in-house studio founded by Green and Senreich.
“We’ve been lucky enough to do the show over such a length of time that we’ve been able to figure out a lot of things, “Green recalled. “Technology has improved in terms of the cameras we can use, the computers that we can use. We have figured out how to make our puppets easier and how to build sets that we could reuse over time. We’re able to just build new systems or take advantage of new technology to be able to make something at the rate and pace for the price that they were giving us that we needed to.”
Though “Robot Chicken” now uses 3D printing for puppet fabrication and has bigger and more ambitious sketches, the spirit of those original shorts remains, with off-the-shelf commercially available toys still a core element of the sketches. For Green, the most important thing is that the sketches feel tactile and real. “Stop-motion gives you access to a point of interpretation in your brain because we use real movie lenses and real movie lighting,” the co-creator said. “Your eye sees a real texture, a real physical thing, the actual shadows.”
The feeling of changing with the times while remaining as close as possible to how things were at the start is integral to “Robot Chicken,” not just in terms of production for the stop-motion animation but also the approach to pop-culture parodies. Compared to 2005, when Green said the writers struggled to source toys or prove to their lawyers that something existed to parody, the rise of YouTube and social media means nothing stays niche anymore. But also in the time since the show first premiered, we’ve seen the rise of superheroes as the dominant movie form, the rise of anime, and a huge shift in what defines popular culture. For Green, this has only made things easier.
“When the show first started, a lot of the things that we’re talking about were fairly obscure,” Green said. “So the mass acceptance and general knowledge of a lot of these pop icons only makes it easier for us to make jokes about it.”
Still, it’s not like the rise of Marvel means Green and his team want to be topical to the new trends in the film world — quite the opposite. According to Green, what makes “Robot Chicken” different from other sketch comedy shows like “Saturday Night Live” is that they are not going after current events. Instead, they look at what stuck with them from childhood, what they remember most about certain franchises and TV shows and their questions about what happened next.
“We like exploring what’s just off, taking everything that you know about a property and then asking a question that’s totally reasonable to ask,” Green said. “There was a ton of intentional messaging, animated or otherwise, in things from when we were kids. It was even more prevalent in the ’80s, but regardless, no matter its good intentions, we were left with questions. That’s what we try to answer in the show.”
“Robot Chicken” could feasibly tackle topical subjects, of course. But the rise of social media means anyone can do an animated parody in the style of the show, particularly in stop-motion. As Guillermo del Toro once said, “It’s the only technique that a young animator can do with very few resources on their own.”
“We’re definitely aware of the fact that a lot of people can beat us to air with a joke,” Green said. “Our show takes about a year to really get it from script to screen and somebody can just shoot something on their iPhone, so we really have to make sure that our jokes are not the joke that everybody else is thinking of.”
Indeed, it’s been a good long while since “Robot Chicken” has been able to come up with several episodes at a time in a consistent schedule. The last time we had new episodes was back in 2022, and as Green sees it, those may very well be the last episodes ever of the show. “I can say with a bit of certainty that I don’t think we’ll ever do a whole season of ‘Robot Chicken.’ I don’t think we’ll ever do another 20 quarter-hour episodes. What I do expect we’ll do is continue to make half-hour specials that are dedicated to a specific property.” A big reason for this is that, as Green puts it, is that Adult Swim has become “less and less important to the business daddy,” regardless of its success.
The latest “Robot Chicken” special, coinciding with the 20th anniversary, is a parody of the Discovery Channel, particularly reality shows like “90 Day Fiancé.” Though it may not be exactly what fans would expect, Green sees this as an opportunity to prove to the money people that the show is worth keeping around, and to continue tackling different aspects of pop culture. “I look at what ‘South Park’ has done with their specials,” Green said. “Those have been really effective, and each individual special has made money for the parent company and promotion for its streaming platform. I think that’s where we’re going to start to fit in.”
