Toon In: Animated TV Highlights for September, from Universal Basic Guys to More LEGO Star Wars
Photos Courtesy of Disney+, Netflix, and Adult Swim
Welcome to the ink, paint, and pixel corner of Paste TV, where we’re highlighting some of the best premium animation projects on streaming or direct-to-video aimed for teens and adults. This monthly column not only provides an overview of the new animated series to check out, but we’ve also collected some of the finest creators and voice talents in the medium to give updates, or introductions, to their series.
LEGO Pixar BrickToons (September 4)
When you hit upon a successful model, might as well expand it, right? Animated LEGO versions of Walt Disney Company brands have long been a successful pursuit for the Mouse House with LEGO Star Wars specials and series, Marvel character iterations, and other brand extensions from their animation films. Now PIXAR gets in on the trend with the exclusive Disney+ streaming special, LEGO Pixar BrickToons. The series of five original shorts showcase five new stories—animated in brick form—set in the worlds of Brave, Cars, Finding Nemo, Coco, and The Incredibles.
Universal Basic Guys (September 8)
If you’ve visited the Bleacher Report sports website in the last decade, you likely know the work of animators Adam and Craig Malamut. The brothers, who hail from the South Jersey area, created, wrote, and animated the site’s hit sports parody series, Game of Zones, which ran for seven mini seasons. After that success, they went into development with Sony Pictures Television to turn their own long-gestating characters of Mark and Hank Hoagie into an original series. Taking inspiration from their dad, the singular accents they grew up around in the Philadelphia region, and their own sibling dynamics, they played with a host of scenarios to drop the brothers into—from security guards discovering a secret lab to hot dog sellers at the Kresson Golf Club.
But it took lawyer/politician Andrew Yang’s 2020 proposal of government funded universal basic income (or, UBI)—which would provide U.S. citizens a monthly check to boost everyday economic stability—for them to land their show premise.
“We’re like, this could be a future that we’re all going to be facing, losing our jobs to robots,” Craig tells Paste. “Yet it might create enough excess wealth that maybe there’ll be a UBI program like he’s talking about, and if that happens, what do you do? How do you find meaning when our lives have thus far been so defined by our careers in the United States? What do these [brothers] do with their time?” The answer to that is FOX’s new addition to their Animation Domination Sunday lineup: Universal Basic Guys.
Set in the fictional town of Glantown, South Jersey, the very basic Hoagie brothers episodically explore bizarre pursuits like adopting a chimp, taking up sport fishing, or buying an Eagles Superbowl ring.
For anyone from the actual tri-state region (like me), there will be immediate recognition of the accents, the endless strip malls, and even the ‘down at the Shore’ vacation vibes. “I love South Jersey, and a lot of things about it. There’s a lot of really good delis and hoagie shops and all that stuff,” Adam jokes. “And there’s a vibe that everything feels like strip malls and that the local bar is now like a chain.”
Trying to avoid the attractiveness of, say, the Bob’s Burgers town aesthetic, the Malamut’s worked hard with their animation studio, Princess Bento in Melbourne, Australia (under Bento Box Entertainment), to get the particular spirit of their former home into every UBG frame. “We didn’t want it to be like a generic cartoon town,” Craig says. “We want it to feel like Jersey.”
“Sometimes, we’d get art back that was a little upside down, like it was the Australian version of some things,” Adam explains. “We had to phone them and be like, ‘No, the highways look like this…’ We wanted to make it somewhat accurate, but we didn’t want to drive the production team crazy to make everything so accurate. We do go for realism sometimes, and then we have creatures that are half-football trolls, with portals into a whole other world. We always want to keep people on their toes a little bit about when they’re gonna get realism and when things get wacky.”
Craigs adds, “Even though it’s very specific to the area, on a more fundamental level, there’s a universal truth to some of our characters. I think everyone kind of knows their local version of Mark and the Hoagies, and I think that’ll translate, even though the accent might be a little different, and where the antics go down are in New Jersey.” He cites “The Devil You Know,” an episode featuring their version of the Jersey Devil, as the perfect example of how the show mines local mythology and makes it broad enough for everyone to get the joke.
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