Interview: Matt Senreich Co-Creator of "Robot Chicken"

Peter Rizzo: So let me start this off, you did a lot of work with comic books, how has that affected the show?
Matt Senreich: Speaks for the “geek culture” that we like to tap into. I grew up a geek and worked at marvel comics, influenced me to the point where now I’m playing with toys for a living.

PR: In Season 3, there is an actual figure of you depicted in one of the episodes, I was wondering what you did with that figure?
MS: Actually its popping up in season 4 and is currently being animated, so other people are touching me inappropriately right now.

PR: That’s a good living.
MS: Its one of the benefits of having a show.

PR: In the first episode of season 3, you joke about the possibility of being canceled, is there any real life inspiration behind this?
MS: Its sort of become a running joke that at the beginning of every season that we’re going to be canceled but then we get renewed. So we’ll probably keep doing that until we do get canceled.

PR: When do you think that will be?
MS: Well I’m just hoping not for now so they can pay my bills for longer.

PR: I had a lot of questions about the actual animation process. It must take a really long time to animate these scenes how do you decide which ideas are funny enough to be on the show
MS: Um…for us its one of those things were it’ll be a few of us in a writer’s room, and we’ll think of as many ideas as we can for a day. We’ll sit around a table myself, Seth and our two head writers Tom and Chuck. It has to be a 3-1 vote to get into the show. Four very differing viewpoints of what’s funny. And when we try to justify why we don’t like a skit, but at the end of the day it’s people with a different sense of humor. And we hope that our sense of humor is the same as everyone else’s out there. We’re sketch comedy so we can go from a very dark comedic sketch to something that is just slapstick. We like the idea of just jumping around a lot because then if you didn’t like this one skit, maybe you’ll like the next.

PR: So at the end of this process once you’ve assembled all your clips, how do these then get processed into episodes, do you try to go for any themes or…
MS: Little complicated, its one of those things where we think about it in our minds how it will play out, we put every sketch idea onto an index card and it’ll probably be for four or five episodes at a time. About 15 cards an episode when it starts, okay how many original hand sculpts will have to get made, how many toys will have to get made cuz we cant have too many in one episode. We have to have just around roughly the same amount which are very complicated sketches, Based on all that we’ll try to match things up and try to get it where we feel we need it to be.

PR: Favorite guest to have on the show?
MS: It varies, a lot of them and they’ve all given me such great stories. The first one that always comes to mind is Burt Reynolds and Dom DeLouise, I grew up loving Cannonball Run it was one of my favorite movies and to watch the two of them interact with each other, to watch Burt Reynolds actually slap Dom DeLouise when he screwed up his lines, and to learn that was real and see it person. It was great you could tell that these guys have been friends for a really long time. That was surreal. George Lucas, especially because I didn’t realize he had such a wicked sense of humor, hes a very sarcastic person that you just don’t expect because he comes across as shy in interviews. So when he comes out with that quick wit it catches you and I really enjoyed that.

PR: How did you come up with a title for the show?
MS: We didn’t actually have a title for the show it was just a bunch of animated shorts for the web called, Sweet J presents in 2000. We did it for so many months we used it as our pitch but when we pitched it we needed a new title, they didn’t like that. So we submitted like 60 titles and they all got rejected. Then we submitted Robot Chicken, which is a local Chinese restaurant over here, just a funny title they loved. Then we realized we screwed ourselves because now we’d have to come up with a reason for the show name.

PR: Is that where the title sequence comes from?
MS: Yeah we needed a way to explain why the show was called “Robot Chicken” so we did that skit and it was kind of a “clockwork orange” parody.

PR: Where do you see Robot Chicken in 10 years? Do you see it having the longevity of the Simpsons and these other shows?
MS: You know its one of those things as I said that we’re just gonna keep working on it as long as we can, and we’re not bored, right now we’re just having a lot of fun doing. In a perfect world, maybe it turns into like an SNL that is around for a really long time, with different people coming in, but for right now we gotta enjoy it.