June 8th, 2020 
Jackson Murphy 
Stoopid Buddy Stoodios veterans John Harvatine IV and Tom Root came-up with the idea for Crossing Swords about a decade ago. After quite a journey, the adult animated series is finally ready to be released, with Season 1 of the stop-motion show debuting this Friday June 12th on Hulu.
JM: Animation has kept going through this COVID-19 time, but for stop-motion shows, you have to physically touch and move the characters on a set. Were the majority of these episodes shot and edited before COVID-19?
John Harvatine IV: Good point. Hard-hitting question. Yeah, we were lucky that we did all the animation last summer – actually late spring, summer and early fall. And then they’ve kind of been sitting in the can for a little bit. So we were ready and waiting to unleash this on the world.
JM: Where did the inspiration for this concept come from? It’s wacky and wild.
Tom Root: (laughs) The inspiration for this actually dates back almost a decade now. I think next year it’ll be a full decade since we came-up with the idea for Crossing Swords. It went through many names and many iterations. But essentially when Stoopid Buddy Stoodios formed, Harv and I put our heads together and talked about what kind of show we would want to make together at this new studio. And Harv was always captivated by the idea of peg people as a puppet, just by how limited they were and how cute they were.
Peg people as toys are really intended for preschoolers because they’re really simple. There’s nothing to break. And they make them so big now that you can’t swallow them. It’s the perfect toy! The look of them is really engaging. So we tried to think of what would be the perfect environment for peg people to run around in. And really we settled on a sword and sorcery fantasy environment. And from there, we tried to pick the kind of environment where you could envision a map full of playsets where our characters could go to a different playset every episode – and it would be really colorful and interesting to look at.
We’d never run out of places to go. A fantasy world seemed to be the best direction for that. I started drawing a map of the world on a dry erase board and adding to it, and that map stayed up for months and inspired us to keep working on this idea. This is like 2011. Eventually it turned into a show. It’s a very long story from there but now it’s gonna be on Hulu, and we’re very excited.
JM: The peg people don’t have traditional arms and legs. They move in such unique ways. And they are engaging to watch. How were you able to make them move and have objects in mid-air – and the characters being able to hold and throw things?
JH: That’s the tricky part. That’s something we really learned on Robot Chicken: toy animation is something that the studio has done for a while and has done really well. So the trick is to make those little characters not only animatable but also emote and be things that you can believe in. You watch the character talk and you’re connecting to them. A lot of the expressions of the face and the eyes and the blinks and the mouths… we don’t have any arms to gesture so we give them props to move around to point to if they need.
It gets a little tricky in storytelling to not have any limbs, but you have a sword or shield to help. There’s wires on the little props so they can move around, and there’s wires underneath the bodies so we can have them bounce. And then in post, we have magicians that rub-out the wires. And when we play it back, you can’t see them at all. Magic!
JM: Which of the sets was the most fun to bring to life from that map?
TR: We take our characters to a medieval version of Coachella, and we had a lot of fun deciding what the rules of our rock and roll were gonna be. Our world is not exactly tied to any specific date or country. Our characters speak English. It’s not England. They don’t live in London. There’s no specifics tied to anything. It might not even be our Earth. We kind of just ignore the rules. We got to build from the ground up this rock and roll festival, which shouldn’t be happening in a sword and sorcery world. And we had a lot of fun. The main stage is this death metal experience, and it itself is animated and breathes fire.
JM: On Robot Chicken, you’re able to throw-in pop culture references and make stories out of current shows and current movies. But even though CS is in a more old-fashioned setting… is it tricky to incorporate modern references or because you don’t have rules, you just say, “You know what? We’re just gonna do whatever feels right to us?”
JH: Whatever feels right, but I think also taking the spirit of Robot Chicken… when we do the show, we find things that are more timeless and not necessarily of the moment. You don’t want to seem of this specific time, you’re just kind of playing around with it – dancing around it.
TR: In the same episode as the rock festival, there are characters standing in line asking the princess to do favors for them. And one of them is clearly asking the princess to get Brendan Dassey from Making a Murderer on Netflix out of jail. But we would never use the word Netflix on our show. We’re making the fun of the fact that we’re not really talking about the specific show, but we want to remind people of that show.
JM: Hulu, interestingly, is really getting things going with animation. They had a few things in the past, but with Solar Opposites and Crossing Swords, they’re not really getting into adult animation. What do you think interested Hulu about this show and bringing you guys on board?
TR: Adult animation is such a proven… performer at this point. It’s sort of this rock-solid thing. If you have your adult animation house in order, it can run forever. That’s a pretty well-learned lesson at this point. Hulu’s not the only one trying to get adult animation up and running, which is good for all of us who make it. We were really pleased that they were taking it seriously and wanted to work with creators like Justin Roiland and get high quality stuff on their platform. And there’s more to come, too. It’s gonna keep building and building. We’ve heard a lot of good stuff coming down the wire. So it’s really gonna be an adult animation destination for years to come.
JM: Nicholas Hoult voices the main character, Patrick. It’s not his traditional British accent, though. How was it working with him on this high-pitched, upbeat American voice?
JH: Root and I had a really fun time trying to find a voice that felt original. He’s such a good actor and so fun to work with, and he’s got such a great voice. We just strip him away and give him an American accent, which to us it just sounds original and funny. We were working with him and trying to find what voice to use. This was satisfying for us – he was really good at it. It sounds different for us.
JM: And the cast you’ve assembled: Luke Evans, Adam Pally, Yvette Nicole Brown, Tony Hale. Who surprised you the most in the voice booth when it came to where they took their character?
TR: Boy, that’s a good question. When Tony Hale is in the booth, nobody’s surprised that he’s a genius because there’s so much evidence that he’s a genius. But we knew he was our Blarney, but for budget reasons, everyone does three characters. So we would have to give Tony these characters with one or two lines. And he would bring as much attention and creativity to those after-thought characters as he would to his main character.
Suddenly… there’s a character in the first episode who’s nailing flyers up in the town square. That’s Tony. The voice he chose for that guy not only was really funny, but he seemed to give that character this whole inner world and backstory that you can tell is there. We didn’t write him that way. Tony made him a full character and all of sudden we wanted to start including the flyer guy in other episodes. So that was surprising.
JH: He wouldn’t change the lines at all. He just changed how you say it or inflections on other words – and change the tone completely and made it really funny. He really added to it.
JM: I like the flyer guy. He’s one of my favorite characters. What will you guys be doing on Friday? Are you gonna have a Watch Party and do some social media-type things?
JH: Yeah, Root. What are we doing?
TR: Well, I say we rent out a club. Fill that place shoulder to shoulder. (laughs) Well, clearly because of the pandemic we’re probably gonna do a lot of nothing. We’ll get on social media and celebrate. It’s a really big deal and I’m sure we’ll spend all day reaching out to people who helped make it. There are hundreds of people who helped make it who deserve a lot of credit. It’s gonna be a day to think about this path we’ve taken to get to this point. It’s been… so many twists and turns in this road to get here.
JH: Sitting in our pajamas at home!
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