Spatula Madness Production Blog

Heyyyy everyone! I’ve been meaning to make a big status-update post for a while now, but I’ve just kept putting it off… and off… and off…

Weelllll here it is!

Obviously Spatula Madness has taken me waaay more time to complete then I originally anticipated. Most of the delay has been me simply underestimating the amount of work that was involved in making a movie like this. And the longer I work on it the more bored I get animating spatulas all day, and the less work I actually get done.

That hasn’t been the only delay though, I’ve also been sidetracked by a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff with Charlie the Unicorn. I have been contacted by no less than 20 different companies wanting to do something with Charlie. I wanted to keep this all private in case it fell through, and now that is all HAS fallen through I feel okay posting about it

First up was merchandising companies. A few different groups wanted to turn Charlie into a “brand” and market the characters on thermoses, pens, balloons, fire hydrants etc etc. I was offered all sorts of money for this, but of course when the contracts came they were totally different than what was originally described to me. So, alas, you won’t be able to buy a Charlie the Unicorn Fun Thermos at Wal-Mart anytime soon. A great loss for the world.

Then there were the mobile phone companies wanting to charge people to download Charlie the Unicorn onto their phones. These were easy to turn down, as I would rather people be able to download the cartoon for free to any phone / media player / spy watch / virtual reality headset they own.

Then there were the people who wanted me to make a second Charlie cartoon to advertise their site / new show / fabulous kitchenware set. Have you seen the web series “Quarterlife“? Yeah. Someone wanted Charlie to advertise that.

Then there was Nickelodeon, who said they wanted to set up a phone interview with me and then never wrote back, and National Lampoon, who were interested in my ideas until I actually sent them, at which point they realized that all of my ideas are monumentally lame and retarded and stopped writing back. Dear Nickelodeon and National Lampoon: I have a great idea for a TV series that involves talking dolphin math professors. They do math… AND they’re dolphins! Two for the price of one! ISN’T THAT HILARIOUS?! Lets do lunch!

Then I got a call from the awesome Matt Harrigan over at Adult Swim, who was interested in hearing my show ideas. I sent him four or five small treatments for shows based on The Cloak, Bino the Elephant and other pilot ideas I’ve been working on, and the response was “So tell me about Charlie the Unicorn.” He had seen the short and thought it would make a funny TV show. Great! I have to be honest, I was so caught up in the fact that I was talking to Adult Swim about turning Charlie the Unicorn into a show that I temporarily forgot what a terrible idea a Charlie the Unicorn show would be. I mean don’t get me wrong, I think Charlie is funny, but if it got picked up we’re talking about 143 minutes of Charlie here. How the heck would that work?

Well that’s what I set off to find out. I called my friend Matt Books and over the next few days we tried to figure out how in the hell to take a 3 minute, 1 joke cartoon and flesh it out into an entire series. Eventually we got a basic feel for what we wanted to do with the show and I put together a 4 minute video pitch detailing what the show would be about. The video included Charlie talking about what a terrible idea the show was, and then a minute-long sequence of my dog running around with a paper cone on his head.

I uploaded it to my site and then sent it off to Adult Swim. Woo! So, the next day I hadn’t heard back and was kind of worried. Maybe I would have been better off explaining all the reasons they should pick up the show instead of the reasons they shouldn’t. Another day goes by, nothing. Then a week. Then another week. And then 3 months. Obviously my video pitch failed to impress.

Or not, almost exactly 3 months after I sent it I get a call out of the blue from Matt Harrigan. “Hey Jason, loved the video pitch, we want to go ahead and put this show through, can you get me a pilot script by Tuesday?” It was Friday, by the way.

Soooo Matt Books drives down and we spend the next couple days watching “Final Destination 2″ and eating at Denny’s at 3 in the morning because we couldn’t figure out what the hell to write about. I KNOW! The Blue unicorn and the Pink unicorn can say “tomato” because it sounds funny when they say “tomato”! GENIUS! Well okay that one was my idea, Matt Books wanted all of the characters to be murdered and dismembered, their bodies hung from trees in the jungle as a warning to other unicorns.

Eventually we settled on a sort of middle ground between “tomatoes” and “dismemberment”, and sent Adult Swim the finished script early Tuesday morning. We tried to make it “Adult Swimy,” by which I mean we had organs falling out of bodies, a flower that wanted to be urinated on, you know. Mature stuff. I thought we had gone a little far… not because I thought we had actually gone too far, but because this was Charlie the Unicorn, a cartoon whose main fan base was 12 year old girls.

Adult Swim thought differently - we hadn’t gone nearly far enough. The script was, as they put it, “too kid-like” and needed to be made more R-rated. Also, they wanted each 11 minute episode to be multiple short Charlie cartoons instead of one long 11 minute one.

So at this point I’m working on developing a “mature audiences only” Charlie the Unicorn show for Adult Swim… and to be honest I didn’t think it was incredibly funny. A super-violent The Cloak, that would be awesome and hilarious. Charlie though? I wasn’t sure if it fit.

Regardless of all that, they wanted to go ahead and officially sign me on and get the production started. They asked what I would need to produce the show. Hmm. This is the list I sent them:

————————————————–
We’ll require the following items:

Dance Dance Revolution Arcade System (1)
Boa constrictor (1)
5 Gallons of Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream (5)
Half a kilo of cocaine (1)
Abe Lincoln’s skull (2)
Horse and Buggy with driver (must be Amish) (1)
125 pound rottweiler (1)
The hope diamond (1)
One fully grown redwood tree (1)
Timecop on DVD (1)
The full Van Damme collection (1)
A lock of Alyson Hannigan’s hair (1)
A lock of Andy Kaufman’s hair (1)
A dirigible, painted black (1)
Smokey the Bear costumes (2)
The gold spike driven into the ground by Leland Stanford that joined the east / west railroads (1)
————————————————–

The response:

“Awesome, I’ll get to work on your requests. The cocaine might be hard because we’re out of baggies.”

Hah, alright so I’ll be working on a show I’m not totally behind, but at least these guys are cool.

The contract for the show finally came in. It was 14 pages long. I have no idea if that’s standard in the industry or not. Here’s a few specifics:

I wouldn’t have final creative say (I assume very few people do in TV land.) I would be getting $2,500 for signing over the rights to the Charlie series. That’s less than I made in my CafePress t-shirt store that month. The real money would come from the actual production of the series, but of course there’s absolutely no guarantee the series itself would be picked up - all they wanted right then was a pilot. You see, they order pilots and then air them for executives and advertisers, and try to see which ones are likely to do well and make them money. It’s likely I wouldn’t know if the show itself had been picked up for at least half a year, and in the meantime I’d have to take down my CafePress store because they wanted full merchandising rights. This is, I assume, fairly standard in the TV industry.

Eh. I sent them back an e-mail with a few term changes. There were a couple legal things I wanted to be made clear in the contract, and I wanted the purchase price to be raised higher, so that my risk was less. They agreed to my terms, and sent me a new contract. A new contract that had 9 additional pages - masterful legal judo that removed all of my rights to everything, and then some. I’m not a lawyer, but to my untrained eye most of the contract seemed “not exactly in my favor.”

It was around this time that sales in my Charlie the Unicorn t-shirt store were getting higher and higher every month. I had e-mails coming in every two weeks from online companies offering me money to do cartoons for them. I even had a cool guy from Columbia Records wanting me to do a music video for a new band they had signed. I was getting less and less excited about the idea of doing a Charlie show. On the one hand, it was freaking Adult Swim, home of most of my favorite shows ever. On the other hand, I’d be making a show I wasn’t thrilled with for less money than I was making doing nothing, and not only that but I’d have to put the “Spatula Madness” feature on hold for another year while I worked full time on Charlie crap.

So, in a choice between “making a show I wasn’t excited about, in a way I didn’t think was the best way to make it, for less money than I could make independently” or “work independently and make whatever I want to make” I picked the latter. Had it been a Cloak show, or something I though had the potential to be great, I would have done it for almost nothing. But it wasn’t worth working so long and hard on a project I didn’t believe in, especially if I was going to take a pay cut.

Maybe in a year or two I’ll get the chance to make a show that I actually think could be great, but for now I’m staying independent.

But that doesn’t mean I’m not still selling out! You should see Charlie shirts at Hot Topic soon. No, really. Hot Topic contacted me and wants to carry Charlie merchandise. Want to know something that will blow your mind? Hot Topic is the most reasonable of all of the companies I’ve dealt with over the last year. The contract they sent me was short, to the point, and exactly how they said it would be. They respond to my questions within a day, and have been a friendly and professional group to deal with. It figures that the store with the “Welcome to Hell” entrance would be the nicest most reasonable company out there.

In other news: I’ve taken some of my favorite bits from the Charlie pilot script and turned it into “Charlie the Unicorn 2″, which will be released soon on the web. I think it’s better than the first Charlie, and it’s totally kid-friendly too! I can save the dismemberment for my other cartoons. And there will be many more cartoons. In April I’m moving back to Orlando, and I plan to start releasing at least two cartoons a month on FilmCow. I’ll also be working to finally finish Spatula Madness and get THAT released. After that? Who knows! If any TV executives out there are interested in my hilarious idea for a math-dolphin show give me a call!