Matthew Senreich is the co-creator, director, producer, and writer for Robot Chicken. Matt’s resume is a nerd’s Christmas wish list containing work experience with Marvel Comics and Wizard Entertainment. Matt and fellow co-creator, Seth Green, also run the production company Stoopid Monkey. With a fourth season of the show under their belt and two feature length films in the works, I was lucky enough to sit down with Matt and steal a few minutes of his life away.

Generation: Next week I will be doing a review of the third season.

Matt Senreich: Uh oh, be gentle.

G: Oh no, it’s fantastic thus far, I’m about halfway through it.

M: You’re a better man than me to be able to sort through all of that stuff… And rumor has it, there are Easter Eggs, so good luck finding those, because it’s impossible to find one of them…. I had to have Adult Swim tell me where they hid it, because I was like “I’m not going to be able to figure this out.”

G: I saw that you worked for ToyFare magazine and then met up with Seth Green later and started “Sweet J Presents” for Sony online. Were the stop motion animation techniques inspired by that work with ToyFare?

M: You know, it really did start when Seth called me up saying that he was going on Conan O’Brien, and he wanted to bring a short film with him. He had this idea of having his action figure that had just come out from Austin Powers and Buffy going on an adventure with the Conan O’Brien action figure that he had just used on the show. And he asked me, with the sense of humor that our magazine had, if I was interested in creating something with him. And yeah, we knew nothing about stop-motion animation, and we just went to a whole bunch of art schools in New Jersey just asking third year students if they were interested in doing it for free or for cheap. This was back in the day and age before the internet wasn’t really big, but Sony digital heard of it and offered us the opportunity to do 12 animated shorts for them. So we ended up doing that while I was still working at the magazine.

G: Did that original sketch turn into one of the “Sweet J Presents” shorts?

M: The very first “Sweet J Presents”

G: But you guys later turned some of them into shorts on Robot Chicken?

M: Yes, “The Real World: Metropolis” was one of the good ones, and we turned that one into a sketch in our first season.

G: Now, the name of the show, is it really from a Chinese restaurant?

M: It is really from a Chinese restaurant; we submitted like 60 titles, they rejected everything. As a goof in our next round, we submitted 10 -15 more titles, and we threw “Robot Chicken” in, as a joke, because it was this dish we ordered in from this Chinese restaurant while we were writing the first season of the show, and they latched onto it, and Adult Swim was like “That’s brilliant!” We had that “Holy Shit” moment of now, how does “Robot Chicken” deal with a sketch comedy show about toys? So, we had to figure out an opening. And to give our head writer, Doug Goldstein credit, he came up with that Clockwork Orange kind of opening.

G: And it wasn’t an intended similarity to the Star Trek character Locotus of Borg?

M: No, not at all. Yeah, it was one of those where we were just kind of really struggling.

G: Well, it seems to have worked!

M: Yes! No complaints. And we still eat Robot Chicken, which is tasty.

G: Do you feel that you are a Robot Chicken?

M: [Laughs] As far as watching television goes? You know, I do it, not on purpose, but I find myself attracted to it. I’m a TV junkie.

G: How do you guys continue to draw inspiration from franchises that are pretty much dead?

M: It’s one of those things where we just have a nostalgia and a love for these things that we grew up with. It’s just remembering what we loved most about it and taking the absurd, or twisting it, and showing the mundane in that absurd world.

G: And just kind of juxtaposing them together?

M: Exactly, It’s a little mix and match, and then we also like to do some of our original sketch comedy stuff. Whatever we talk about that we think is funny, we’re just kind of throwing it into the show and hoping that other people will enjoy it as well.

G: What is your turnaround time for an episode?

M: It’s tricky to say, because we are writing an episode while we are actually animating an episode and voicing an episode. Everything is in different stages all at once. But the Star Wars special, since it was kind of self-contained, it’s the best example. For a 22-minute episode that we did, it was about 14 weeks, start to finish.

G: So current events for the most part are out of the question for you?

M: Current events are near impossible. Like, for us to make fun of the election and do something with either Palin or throw Obama in there, it just can’t happen, because if we write it now, I don’t know who’s going to be president when this airs in May.

G: Have you guys ever not been able to do a sketch, due to a lack of specific puppets or props?

M: You know, we always find a way. It may not look as good, some of them that may not have something that exists for it. But we still can get the feeling across in some capacity; we have a lot of talented guys working here who can recreate sets and puppets unlike any other.

G: Are the mouths on the characters made of clay?

M: It’s actually sticker mouths that you can peel off and on. Someone’s job here is to track read, and for every syllable, it’s a different mouth that they would put on, as they take the pictures. And depending on the difficulty of the shot, we can do it digitally as well. But we try to do, again, everything in camera as much as possible.

G: How big are the puppets?

M: About eight inches for most of them, depending on what it is. Like for GI-Joe sometimes, we shoot 3-3/4” [inches] scale for those toys, or 12 inches for some of the Star Wars stuff.

G: So I guess TV really does make you look thinner then?

M: Exactly.

G: Do you have any favorite sketches or guest stars that you’ve had on the show?

M: It’s hard for me, I fall in and out of love with sketches, depending on where I am. I’ve always had a fondness for “World’s Most One-Sided Fist Fights.” That’s where I realized that violence with toys is funny, and that’s how people have come to mock me on the show now, as my character on the show does that. From season three, “1776” might be one of my favorites. It’s a 300 parody using all of the American Revolution men. There’s a bunch of different stuff, they’re all my babies to some capacity, and there are even sketches in there that I despise that still are in the show. But that’s what I love about our show, is that, even if you don’t love everything, it’ll move on to something that you do love.

G: Yeah, some of my favorite sketches are the five second long ones.

M: And what’s great is, your favorites will be someone else’s least favorites.

G: Have you ever had any negative backlash from any controversial sketch you’ve done?

M: It all depends, people say “How can you do certain things?” We’ve had people say, “I don’t think that’s funny.” It really hasn’t been too bad. It’s gotten to the point where toy companies send us toys now. It has been really flattering. We have actors asking to be on the show.

G: Saves you some money then, huh?

M: Yeah. We’re in essence promoting these properties for free and making them look cool to a whole generation and the audience that grew up with them. And we do it with love and that’s the difference. And I think a lot of people who think they can write for the show, or think they could be on the show, just throw random combinations of characters in and it’s always something degrading to the characters; they don’t realize that we’re always trying to make the love of the toy and characters come to life.

G: You guys are working on a second Star Wars special.

M: We are. It’s coming out November 16.

G: How did that go this time around?

M: Awesome. It came out really great. We’re going to focus a lot more on the bounty hunters. Were still going to jump around the universe… Tread in prequel territory here and there. Our versions of the Emperor and Vader will be in it. But, you’ll see how those Bounty Hunters came to be hired.

G: Awesome. Who is your favorite obscure Star Wars character?

M: Obscure Star Wars character? Boba Fett was, until they didn’t make him as obscure.

G: You expressed interest at Comic Con this year to do more specials. Are there any in the works yet?

M: Not yet. We’re talking to some people, but if we’re gonna do a special, it has got to be something big. For us to do a Star Wars special, we have to outshine ourselves always.

G: Yeah, there’s so much room to work with there… That’s about it, thank you for taking the time to sit down with me.

M: Thank you so much, I really appreciate it.