After a preview last Sunday night, FOX’s new Animation Domination High-Def programming block launches Saturday night. Having been so successful with animation on Sundays for many years, FOX will now use the 11pm-12:30am timeslot to launch new animated titles, airing in 15 minute blocks, starting with an adaptation of the comic book Axe Cop and High School USA!, from Community’s Dino Stamatopoulos.
The Executive Producers of ADHD are Nick Weidenfeld and Hend Baghdady. Weidenfeld comes to FOX having previously worked at Adult Swim as head of development, while Baghdady’s credits include Warren the Ape and Crank Yankers. I spoke to the duo about their approach with ADHD, how it differs from Adult Swim, long term goals and more.
IGN TV: What were your first conversations with FOX like? They’d had this time slot for a long time. MADtv aired there for many years, but since then they’ve tried a couple different things.
Nick Weidenfeld: Well, it really started off with not even necessarily about the time slot. I had been talking with [FOX president] Kevin Reilly just about animation in general. He was sort of picking my brain over why things took so long, why it seemed so much harder than live-action comedy, all of that stuff. As we talked about it in the ways of my experience of doing an Adult Swim production and how shows move quickly and shorter orders and all that stuff and it came up, “Well, we have this time slot, and animation is very successful on Sunday night.” We just talked about it in general. You know, he started talking about The Simpsons. He talked about how Seth MacFarlane started Family Guy, how it started as a short on Cartoon Network... all these things, and they grew out of something. He’s like, “This seems like a very smart way to get something successful in animation, so since we have this successful block on Sunday night, we can push people that clearly like animation and watch animation to go to this time period on Saturday late night.” And if something’s successful, it has this very organic, built in upstreaming system, where it can very easily grow into a Sunday night show, if that makes the most sense.
Given that they had an audience that was already into animation and they’d been holding this period from the affiliates, I think that Kevin was like, “Well, the one thing we haven’t tried is maybe the most obvious thing,” which is animation. Unlike sketch, these things can grow into series. That’s the history of them. So that’s how that started. Then we started to talk about the method of production: how would we actually fill that time period? I’d worked with Hend on a bunch of Adult Swim shows and on other stuff in the past, and she was a very good friend of friends. You need someone that is experienced in production, especially in animation, that can oversee that. So that’s when Hend came on-board. Because it was like, “Oh, we should be producing this stuff ourselves.” It happened in a very cool, organic way, like, “Well, we like animation,” and thinking about the time period that they had and what would work. So it was very nice. It wasn’t just, “Oh, here it is,” and then we don’t know what we’re doing. We had to figure it out.
IGN: Hend, you pretty much do all of the animation out of your offices here in L.A., right?
Hend Baghdady: Yeah, that was partially what Nick is talking about, about setting up the business and figuring out how to do this. I had done shows in the past where we kept everything in-house and we built a studio around it, and it just ended up being a process where we could move much faster and have a lot more flexibility in how we really produce and create shows and how the creative interacts with the production side. So one of our main goals once we decided to really create Animation Domination as a brand beyond just a production company was figuring out a way to keep everybody in-house. We’ve had to let a couple people work from home just because of the sheer volume right now -- but we have about 155 people from design, animation, compositing, editing and writing, which is pretty awesome. It’s worked out very well. I think because of that we’ve had everybody -- all of our people are invested in the success of the block as a whole. Rather than just being an animator on Axe Cop, they feel a part of the bigger picture. There’s just a different attitude when people come in the building, as you’ve seen.
IGN: Clearly, the next big step is finding what the content will be. The first thing that was announced was Axe Cop. Nick, that precedes our involvement with ADHD as far as something you had percolating, right?
Weidenfeld: Yeah. When I was at Turner and Cartoon Network, Nick Offerman [who voices Axe Cop on the series] had brought this to my attention, this comic. I had worked with him on Childrens Hospital. It was a text that said, “Do you know this thing?” I said, “No.” He goes, “Well, you should, and if you ever make it, I want to be Axe Cop.” So I tried to work a deal out there, and I think for a lot of reasons that things don’t happen -- we’d gotten pretty far with it, but then it just wasn’t the right fit, then the deal couldn’t go through. For just a lot of reasons, it just wasn’t working. Then when this started, it felt like in trying to define what this brand is and what the voice of this brand is, it felt like, “Oh, this should be the first thing we do.” I had been talking to people about this idea of trying to create, as much as possible, a much more un-ironic, non-cynical place, both in the work environment and the content that we were creating. It like the smartest way to do that and the most obvious way would be to have a show from a five-year-old. It was like, “Oh! This shouldn’t be the second or third or fourth [show]. If we go out of the gate saying ‘This is who we are,’ and you really own that, then I think it sort of extends into everything else that we’re doing.” So even though in some ways High School USA! may feel different than that, I think they’re actually much more similar than you’d think. But just the out-of-the-gate idea that this thing is the voice of who we are and sort of extends beyond that, yeah, that started earlier, but it would have just been another show. Anywhere else I would have worked, it just would have been a show. I think it’s very much a defining voice for what we’re trying to do. So yeah, that’s why it was the first and why I think it was so important that it was the first.
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