Renzetti enjoyed his time on Oh Yeah! Cartoons! It was like an animation laboratory where he could experiment with many short films. Courtesy of Nickelodeon.

DT: Mina and the Count was one of the Oh Yeah! projects that seemed the most poised to become a hit. Why didn’t Mina make it to a full series?

RR: I really liked that idea, too. Mina was my favorite, the one I was hoping would make it to a series. But for some reason at that time it didn’t connect with the people that make the decisions about series. I think, maybe, the subject matter was a little bit touchy for them, because of the vampire and the little girl combination, although it was innocently presented and it was always intended to stay innocent. Mina just didn’t connect with the executives here.

DT: My Life as a Teenage Robot and Whatever Happened to Robot Jones, the series you and Greg Miller worked on, both feature young robots trying to find their way and fit in, often in a school setting. Is this a theme you enjoy exploring?

RR: Well, the shows were developed independently and it was just coincidence that both Greg and I came up with that theme. I know that a lot of people were worried that Teenage Robot was going to be derivative of Robot Jones when they first heard the idea, but the sensibilities were so far apart that I never felt that it was a problem for me to work on both series, or for both of them to exist. I love Robot Jones; I’m a big fan of the show. The only thing that was disappointing about getting my own series was that I had to stop working on that show. I was having a great time working with Greg and helping him do his series.

DT: Robot Jones was an interesting show; it had that funky Schoolhouse Rock look to it.

RR: That was definitely an intentional thing that Greg and art director Mike Stern were going for. I loved it because it was very fresh looking and different from anything else that was on TV at that time.

DT: You’ve been a director on some very popular and imaginative shows such as Samurai Jack, Dexter’s Laboratory and Powerpuff Girls, to name a few. How did the experience contribute to your development prior to getting your own series?

RR: I was very lucky to be part a small group of individuals that was able to work as a team on those shows. I consider myself lucky to have worked with both Genndy (Tartakovsky) and Craig (McCracken); we all drew inspiration from each other. We had all developed the same tastes together coming from Cal Arts, and we were all influenced by the same kind of stuff. Genndy has an amazing work ethic and an incredible instinct for what is or isn’t going to work. His sense of timing and editing is second to none.

Craig is one of the most talented artists I’ve ever met and a great character designer. Everything Craig draws has a natural appeal to it. I was able to learn my craft on their shows. Hopefully, what I bring is the experience of having worked on them. I just try to live up to the standards that those two have set. I try to meet that level of artistry.

Originally entitled My Boyfriend is a Teenage Robot, Renzetti had envisioned pairing up a male robot with human teenage girl. All My Life as a Teenage Robot images courtesy of Nickelodeon.

DT: How did you develop and shape the ideas behind My Life as a Teenage Robot?

RR: Teenage Robot was the last thing I did for Oh Yeah! Cartoons!, and it was developed pretty quickly. I had one more slot to fill as a director for the number of shorts I was slated to do, and I came up with the basic idea. I pitched to Fred Seibert, the executive producer of Oh Yeah!. He had a couple of comments and I tweaked it from there. The show went through about a million-and-one titles, but it was originally supposed to be called “My Boyfriend is a Teenage Robot.”

The roles were somewhat reversed; the robot was very much a straight male robot and the teenage girl was actually human. She was still the main character because she had all the typical teenage angst, but Fred felt that a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship with a robot might be a touchy area. So, I decided to make the teenage angst-y girl, who was the star of the show anyway, into the robot. After that, the idea really fell together naturally.

DT: At a recent showing of Teenage Robot for ASIFA Hollywood, you told the audience about some of the influences on the show: Astroboy, the Fleischer cartoons, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Can you go into that a bit more?