Justin Cook chats with SuperMansion’s Zeb Wells, Matthew Senreich and Tom Root at New York Comic Con about SuperMansion: Drag Me to Halloween, horror inspirations and potential guest stars on SuperMansion…
On October 5th, Crackle debuted SuperMansion: Drag Me to Halloween, a SuperMansion holiday special that follows the League of Freedom and their spooky misadventures on Halloween night. The creators of the show, Zeb Wells and Matthew Senreich, also collaborated on Adult Swim’s long-running Robot Chicken; writer Tom Root lends his talents to both shows as well.
Are there any actors that you’d like to see guest star on future episodes of the show? I know you had Lake Bell and Phil LaMarr on this episode.
Matthew Senreich: That’s a tough one. We joked at one point about getting Aaron Paul to play with Cranston. I think that would be a lot of fun. Look, with this or Robot Chicken I always say I would love Harrison Ford at any moment at any time. He’s the one that’s always gotten away from me.
Tom Root: I’d love to get any of the James Bonds. That’d be really fun.
Matthew Senreich: To play a character like [James Bond]?
Tom Root: Or to play against type. You never know. When we cast on Robot Chicken, everyone we cast has to play three voices, because we are so budgetarily strained. And the union says we can make them do up to three voices. And a lot of actors… you know, we cast them for one thing, but they have two other voices they’ve been wanting to do forever, or they did a play in high school where they had to have a Scottish accent, and they are able to pull it out.
Matthew Senreich: That’s really how Chris Pine got onto the show. He was brought in as this one-off character, and he had done Robot Chicken before, and I told Zeb [Wells], ‘he is his own beast.’ It’s unbelievable what he is able to do. And again, you’re cautious cause you’ve seen him in certain roles and you don’t know what [he’s] capable of. On SuperMansion, he does characters that you wouldn’t even know are him. That’s what blows my mind. And it’s not just one or two, again, every episode he’s doing characters – I dare someone to name every character he’s done. I bow to him… it really is a phenomenon.
Zeb Wells: We’re getting down to me having to think really hard because once you’ve gotten Keegan-Michael Key and [Bryan] Cranston and [Chris] Pine and Jillian Bell, it starts to get hard to think of others. Having them in the booth and just watching them discover their characters, and now, when I’m writing it almost feels like I’m cheating because I could just think of them in the booth doing these voices, and it’s so much easier to write now. So I think at the end of the day almost all of my dreams have come true.
Were there any specific horror movies that you used as inspiration for the episode?
Zeb Wells: Yeah, The Exorcist was one of them, that was the big one. It’s kind of fun because Robobot, he’s always trying to do human things but always kind of failing. So he has pretty much watched every horror movie ever and then tries to concoct the perfect scary story by just adding all of it into one story, so it ends up being a terrible story, but it allows us to get in about 30 different horror movie references in the span of 30 seconds.
Halloween comes to SuperMansion, and Titanium Rex isn’t happy about it! The world of heroes and villains is weird enough without a night of supernatural terrors thrown into the mix. But his requests that the team stay indoors are ignored, and spooky happenings ensue. Cooch is drawn into a trick war with the hapless dentist handing out toothbrushes to trick-or-treaters. Black Saturn has a way-too-close run in with the Groaner at a costume party. American Ranger is seduced by a ghost and Rex must exorcise malicious code that has taken over Robobot’s body.
Drag Me to Halloween is streaming now, so head on over to Crackle to give yourself an early Halloween treat. Additionally, work on the third season of the animated superhero comedy is currently underway.
The holiday special features the return of regular cast members Bryan Cranston, Keegan-Michael Key, Heidi Gardner and Jillian Bell; Phil LaMarr and Lake Bell lend their voices to guest roles on the episode.
Justin Cook
