Four-time Best Comedy Album Grammy-winning executive producer Brian Volk-Weiss is now the creator and director of RoboForce: The Animated Series, which is taking ’80s character toys that didn’t get their proper due and giving them a new shot at entertainment stardom. The show premieres this Saturday April 12th on Tubi. Volk-Weiss, of The Nacelle Company, discusses his lifelong love of animation, having Dwayne Johnson as a RoboForce EP, and making the recent, high profile docuseries on The Simpsons. (This Animation Scoop Q&A was edited for length and clarity.)
Jackson Murphy: Congratulations on this. I know that you have also been behind “The Toys That Made Us”, which has been very popular on Netflix, through your company, Nacelle. So you must have loved these RoboForce toys in the ’80s growing up to get involved with this show.
Brian Volk-Weiss: So it’s interesting. I actually didn’t play with RoboForce as a kid because it was such a disaster. It really was never a thing. In 1983 I was seven, and I was already into “Star Wars” and “Star Trek” and “G.I. Joe”. And there really was no RoboForce to get into because it was such a disaster. However, as I got older and my hobby became less of a hobby and more like a life choice, being toy collecting, and this is about 15 years ago, I fell in love with the design aesthetic of RoboForce. So without even knowing what I was buying, over probably a three year period, I got every single figure. Then I got the three vehicles, then I got the play set. And only after a while I was like, “You know, I love the way this looks.”
And we took what happened in real life and put it into the DNA of the show. RoboForce came out, it was announced at Toy Fair on Tuesday. It was the biggest splash ever. On Thursday this little company called Hasbro announced this little toy line called Transformers. It was 48 hours later, and it destroyed RoboForce. So we took that story and made it the story. So RoboForce, as you saw, gets replaced by Utopia Aegis 101s. It’s a redemption story. It’s about RoboForce getting out of the mud and trying to become the heroes they were supposed to be, which is what we’re trying to do with “RoboForce”.
JM: Right. It is meta in that way. This is a revival of these toys. It’s a revival of these characters. They themselves are rebooting themselves to save the day. That must have been an appeal for you to go, “Yeah, let’s give these guys another chance, a big chance here with television animation.” And you put that into the storyline, and that works as a hook for this.
Brian Volk-Weiss
BVW: Yeah, that’s exactly what we tried to do.
JM: And you love the designs of these characters so much. I love them too. The colors really pop. And also you have the opportunity to showcase their powers. What are we gonna see over this season as far as them using their powers in the right ways and interesting ways, and how that transitioned into hand-drawn animation?
BVW: I’m so glad you asked this. So what we tried to do, and I think we accomplished, is every single character is different at the end of the season than they were at the beginning. Some of the heroes become villains. Some of the villains start to become heroes. Robots that were best friends for 15 years all of a sudden are trying to kill each other by the fifth episode.
JM: The show starts out 2089 and then goes to 2104. And so you have the opportunity to look into the future of what things are gonna be like in about 75-80 years from now. So how fun was that for you and the animation team you brought onto this to look into the future?
BVW: I’ve had a very bizarre career. I started off as a manager of comedians. Then I became a producer of standup comedy specials. Then I started doing documentaries. And now we’re doing animation. That is the short way of saying… I have waited my entire life to build a world. So it has been phenomenal. I’ll give you an example: I’ve been reading since junior high school about this theory that one day humanity will build these elevators. They’re 10-mile long elevators. So instead of having to take a rocket to get into orbit, which is the most expensive part of space travel… escaping gravity, we’re gonna build these 10-mile long elevators. So you take the elevator up, it takes about two minutes, and then you take the spaceship from the port at the top of the elevator. Makes it a lot cheaper, right?
BVW: So I’ve known about those things since junior high school. When I greenlit this, I was like, “You know what? I don’t know how, what, why, where? Let’s make sure we have those in the show.” So you saw it in the opening episode, and spoiler alert, there’s some pretty big scenes about it in the fifth and sixth episode. And that’s just one example. We took stuff that I know is almost definitely gonna happen over the next hundred years and we just put it in there. And we’ll see. It’s kinda like “Star Trek”. We luckily did Leonard Nimoy’s last interview ever. And I’m sure he said this to everybody… but I’m sitting there with the guy who played Spock and he’s on his phone having his hair and makeup done and he just looks at me and he’s like, “I remember when these were props.” That’s like what we’re trying to do.
JM: Wow. That’s amazing that you have these little nuggets that you keep for a long, long time, and then here’s the right time to use them. That is perfect. One of your fellow EPs on the show is Dwayne Johnson. His Seven Bucks Productions is a part of this. That’s gotta be cool to have The Rock involved.
BVW: It’s the greatest thing ever. We do this show on Disney+ called “Behind the Attraction”. Everything connected to the reason you and I are on this Zoom right now. Is because of “Toys That Made Us”. Dwayne saw [that], and then somebody from his team, an amazing writer, and probably one of the funniest human beings I’ve ever met, a guy named Brian Gewirtz, reached out to me the next day and was like, “Hey, we love Toys That Made Us. We should do something together.” That led to “Behind the Attraction”. So when we announced that we had acquired RoboForce and we were putting the toys out and we had greenlit a six episode series, I got another call and it turned out that there were some fans at Seven Bucks of RoboForce, to put it mildly. To answer your question… he’s a pop culture nerd like me. Anything to do that entertains the public with comedy, heart and action, he’s usually a pretty big fan of. Just look at his work.
JM: Yeah. Nice. Another project that you were a part of that I loved was “Icons Unearthed: The Simpsons”.
BVW: Alright! Thank you.
JM: As a lifelong fan of the show, watching the stories, the interviews that you did with the makers of “The Simpsons”… it was phenomenal to get some of the untold story out there. A television highlight of the last five years.
BVW: Thank you. It’s a real labor of love — that series. There’s almost nothing you could have said other than complimenting my children that would’ve warmed my heart as much as you say.
JM: It’s such a fascinating story, and a show that’s still going and just got four more seasons. It’s incredible. Clearly you’ve been a part of big animation related projects that have these fascinating stories behind them. Stories matter to you of how deep and emotional you wanna go with them, whether it’s “The Simpsons” or “RoboForce”.
BVW: I’m so glad you pointed it out because I never would’ve thought to have said this to you: I don’t know if you noticed this or not, but with the exception of “Movies That Made Us”, every single opening that we do is animated — most of it hand-drawn, by the way — and that’s very deliberate. If I’m being honest with you, I’ve wanted to do animation my whole life. So whenever I had a show get greenlit, I would always kind of use it as an excuse to find a way to do some animation. And I literally storyboard every single opening. I hand draw. The storyboards… go to talented people and then the talented people pop out our openings. One of my favorites is the opening for “Icons Unearthed” because we really were able to capture what we were saying without words, just showing the evolution of filmmaking.
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