BURBANK, Calif. _ There's no way of telling how many times evil has been defeated just by looking at the outside of a small nondescript building that sets in the shadow of one of Southern California's numerous interstates. It's not a top secret government facility, but the home of Stoopid Buddy Stoodios, where the Sony Crackle animated series "SuperMansion" is produced.
The team behind the series has used the maze of studios, workshops, recording booth and storage areas to produce a third season of the Emmy-nominated, stop-motion adult comedy series debuting on the streaming service Thursday.
Created by Zeb Wells and Matthew Senreich, "SuperMansion," follows a group of unlikely heroes _ the League of Freedom _ led by the chronologically challenged Titanium Rex (voiced by Bryan Cranston). He and his team _ Black Saturn (Tucker Gilmore), American Ranger (Keegan-Michael Key), Jewbot/Robobot (Wells), Cooch (Heidi Gardner) and Lex (Jillian Bell Brad) _ work out of their SuperMansion base in Storm City.
Wells, who cut his teeth in the comic book world writing for Marvel Comics ("The Amazing Spider-Man," "Wolverine"), talks about the third season while conducting a tour through the facility. He's excited about the new episodes because most of the first two seasons were devoted to establishing the background stories of the band of misfits. It was time well spent according to Wells, because creating the characters' histories was vital to making the series work.
"Within the construct of every episode having its own thing, we started weaving longer character arcs together, and that's been very satisfying to me to scratch that itch I have from comic books," Wells says. "It is serialized storytelling like we do in comic books.
"Early on we learned a parody character would be funny for one joke. But that doesn't sustain you. You really have to dig in and ask yourself who these characters are and what they want. So that every episode you know if you give them something to do, there's something about their character that's going to throw a monkey wrench into it or make it interesting in some way."
In the third season opener, the League ends up trapped in a dystopian future after defeating Zenith's (Yvette Nicole Brown) evil Uncle Ridan (Taran Killiam). They escape, but six months have passed. And their archenemies, Dr. Devizo (Chris Pine) and his Injustice Club, have replaced the League.
It takes a small army of artisans and craftspeople to do the stop-animation. In one small studio, a military command center has been built on a table not much larger than a writing desk. The room will be used in only a few scenes, but the detail from control panels to the images on the wall are too detailed to be seen in one viewing. Then the people, places and things that populate the miniature locations all have to be crafted by hand.
"SuperMansion" art director Frank Duran understands a lot of the details his team puts into each episode will be overlooked. His approach to creating the animation is to concentrate on making the main characters as interesting as possible. The way he looks at it, everything else is filler.
"I love to make everything look good, but I don't want to overdo it to take away from the story or the characters," Duran says.
Modern technology has made the stop-animation process a little easier as multiple body parts or props can be created through a 3D printer. But, the rest of the process remains labor-intensive as scenes are shot one frame at a time. It takes 12 frames to make one second of the show.
"We have developed a whole new visual aesthetic for the show and we are always making new puppets," Wells says of the work that goes into each frame. "We have to decide if the puppets will have animate-able hands or will they have replaceable hands. As you go forward with your plan, things go wrong and you have to fix it.
"This is really the first season where I feel like we settled down and we had everyone in place and they knew what they had to do. So, this has been a really fun and rewarding season."
The third season is also the most ambitious for Wells and the team. Season one had 13 episodes and season two featured 10 episodes and two specials. This season will include 18 episodes and three specials. Production on the third season started in early April 2017.
One of the specials during the third season will be an original holiday production, "A Prayer for Mr. T: The SuperMansion Thanksgiving Special," set to debut Nov. 15. The annual Thanksgiving turkey competition between Titanium Rex and Dr. Devizo goes very wrong when Rex's turkey transforms into a nightmarish bird monster whose eggs hatch freakish bird creatures at an alarming rate.
