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.
LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy (September 13)
In the last four years, there have been three exclusive LEGO Star Wars Disney+ streaming specials centered on characters from the theatrical sequel films, Rey, Poe and Finn. With that era complete, Disney+ debuts a brand-new special that approaches the universe in a radical way. With LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy, executive producer James Waugh tells Paste that the team wanted to do something new, from the perspective of a kids lens, where they mush all the characters from the universe together for maximum chaos.
“We ended up starting where we always start, which is dumping LEGOS out on the table and really thinking about how we could lean into that imaginative way kids actually play by mixing and matching sets,” Waugh says of their creative process.
The result is a four-episode, epic series revolving around young siblings Sig (Gaten Matarazzo) and Dev Greebling (Tony Revolori). Sig’s discovery of a blue LEGO relic ends up disrupting the entire Star Wars universe, forcing the two to fix it before the mythology is unfixable forever.
“It could have been a 44-minute special, but in working with [writers] Dan [Hernandez] and Benji [Samit] and Atomic Cartoons and [director] Chris Buckley, we realized that we could really increase the scope here,” Waugh explains. “We could make this feel bigger and like a real, satisfying, large form experience.”
The miniseries also rethinks the visuals that have become familiar to LEGO Star Wars aficionados. “We really wanted to push ourselves going into this series,” Waugh says. “I think the aesthetic that Atomic Cartoons brought for the holiday specials is really beautiful. It feels lived in. It feels Star Wars. It feels LEGO. The CG quality is incredible and we had that down. So, we really wanted the unifying visual language of the show to also deeply align with the idea of the show. And like I said earlier, the idea of the show really is, this is from a kid’s imagination. We wanted everything to be grounded, or looked at through that lens, so that’s where we started.”
Taking some inspiration from how The LEGO Movie included a kid’s perspective in the animation, Waugh says Rebuild the Galaxy has a mixed media feel to it that distinguishes it from previous outings.
“We would go back and forth with Buckley a good deal finding what was the right line of having that handcrafted experience be forward,” Waugh says. “You’ll notice, like with the corrugated cardboard mountains, they’re not too forward. It’s sort of in the back, but if you really step back and you’re really looking hard, you can see it all. We didn’t want it to be distracting from the storytelling; it’s more of an inference. Even the painted blue skies, you wouldn’t notice them unless you’re really looking for that. It all holds together from that mind of a child building in their room.”
Storywise, the mixing of all characters from all of the Star Wars films and specials meant they had the opportunity to get crazy with their “what if?” scenarios. “There’s a Greedo/Leia relationship, which is just unexpected and it’s handled really fun,” Waugh teases. “Most of those [character] switches come from the place of, ‘It’s the same character, but the circumstances and choices they made in life were different.’”
Waugh continues, “We knew we wanted to have Jedi Palpatine. So much of the comedy and the core of these [specials] was that dynamic with Vader and Palpatine, so we knew we needed to have them. Then what does that look like as a Jedi version? And we got Mark Hamill to come back!”
Asked about the overall tone of the mass mixing of characters and mythologies, Waugh says it’s all done tongue in cheek. “You can see other shows that sort of reference Star Wars and make jokes about Star Wars. But that’s not what this is,” he explains. “We always look at it more from a celebration lens. The question with this four piece event was being able to celebrate that, and being able to say this isn’t something that anybody else would do. We’re not making fun of the thing we love. It’s not making fun of the galaxy. It’s laughing along with it from a loving perspective, and that’s really the difference between something we do from LEGO Star Wars or Lucasfilm, versus a sketch [about] the IP. And that’s really the guideline.”
When asked if this marks the end of the LEGO Star Wars streaming special era, or even these new characters and iterations, Waugh teases, “Did we fall in love with these characters? Yes. Do we want to see more with these characters? Absolutely. Is the show written as a cohesive story on its own? Absolutely. We’ll have to see how things play out in the years ahead.”
Twilight of the Gods (September 19)
If you’re looking for a mythology source steeped in blood, sex, and violence, one only has to look back at the tales of the Norse gods for inspiration. And that’s exactly what executive producer Zack Snyder did in creating his adult animated Netflix original series, Twilight of the Gods. Featuring a highly-stylized animation style from the artists at The Stone Quarry and Xilam animation studios, Gods depicts the war between mortal Norse leaders Leif (Stuart Martin) and his bride, the fierce warrior Sigrid (Sylvia Hoeks), against the immortal gods, Thor (Pilou Asbæk), Loki (Paterson Joseph), Odin (John Noble), and others. A hard-R series, Gods gives fans of action a dose of Snyder’s over-the-top style without his normal restraints of live action gravity or set piece budgets.
Everybody Still Hates Chris (September 25)
In 2009, Everybody Hates Chris, The CW’s hit live action sitcom loosely based on the Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn based childhood of comedian Chris Rock, closed out its four-season run on a high note. Actor Tyler James Williams (Abbott Elementary) who played young Chris, has since grown up and moved onto other shows, along with his co-stars Terry Crews and Tichinia Arnold. Luckily, animation can defy the boundaries of age and time, which opened the door for an animated reboot of the series, Everybody Still Hates Chris, exclusively streaming on Comedy Central/Paramount+. Actor Tim Johnson Jr. is now voicing young Chris, with series creator Chris Rock returning to executive produce and narrate the episodes as older Chris. Crews and Arnold are also back, joining new voice actors playing Chris’ friends and siblings. Animated by Titmouse, Everybody Still Hates Chris adopts the structure and tone of the live action series, but has the ability to explore more of the city and surrounding areas of Brooklyn.
Uzumaki (September 28)
It’s the perfect time of year for Cartoon Network’s Toonami to finally debut the anime series adaptation of Junji Ito’s modern horror manga hit, Usumaki. A project five years in the making, Usumaki is one of only four CN Japanese production collabs in making anime series. This series is made in partnership with Production IG USA, and is executive produced by Jason DeMarco and directed by Hiroshi Nagahama (Fruits Basket). Animated in black and white (in the traditional manga style), this four episode series reveals the mythology of the cursed town of Kurouzu-cho, which is enveloped by a supernatural event involving spirals. They induce cumulative paranoia and intense obsession from the residents, even leading to death. It’s up to two teenagers to battle their effect and find a way to rid themselves of the infection. Intense and haunting, the anime is a reworked and reimagined version of the much longer manga that is a treat for fans of the books, or a great entry point for the anime-curious. New episodes air weekly, with the Japanese and English dubs available to stream the next day on Max.
Tara Bennett is a Los Angeles-based writer covering film, television and pop culture for publications such as SFX Magazine, NBC Insider, SYFY Wire and more. She’s also written official books on Sons of Anarchy, Outlander, Fringe, The Story of Marvel Studios, Avatar: The Way of Water and the upcoming The Art of Ryan Meinerding. You can follow her on Twitter @TaraDBennett or Instagram @TaraDBen
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