I’ve experienced the same thing on other shows where you learn to draw the model sheet first and then learn how to draw the characters. By the time you’re done with a season, the characters don’t look anything like the models anymore. I remember that on Dexter’s Laboratory the model sheets were always a season behind what the characters looked like. So, after that first season of Teenage Robot Alex went back into the main models and he tweaked them a little bit. Since then, I think we’ve locked down what our characters look like. As far as Brit and Tiff go, they’re always evolving because they’re constantly changing their costumes. That’s one reason I keep bringing them back, to see what they’re going to wear next!

Renzetti served as director on Samurai Jack. Courtesy of Cartoon network.

DT: On the subject of villains, an evil planet of robots who call themselves the Cluster was a great concept. Not only did it lend to the sci-fi theme, without them, the show would have had one-shot villains, one after the other.

RR: Right. I wanted to have a general threat, like vampires are on Buffy, that we could just refer to as “The Cluster.” You’d know off the top of your head exactly what that means. I also like the idea of having different villains come from Cluster Prime, the home planet of the evil robots. Another returning villain that kind of surprised everybody was the Space Biker gang. I never intended for them to return but everybody kind of fell in love with them and they’ve proven to be very useful and versatile.

DT: Earlier in the interview, you mentioned that Teenage Robot will air a one-hour special movie this summer (August 13). How was it decided to go with a special?

RR: Nickelodeon asked for it, actually, and I had an idea in the back of my head that I’d wanted to do for a while, which is having Jenny going to Cluster Prime. Queen Vexus has wanted to get Jenny to Cluster Prime ever since they first met, to get her on the side of the evil robots. We thought that a longer format might be a good opportunity to pay that long-term threat off. We wanted to show what Cluster Prime was like, put Jenny down in the middle of it, and see what happens.

Again, one of the things I liked about Buffy was that things were constantly changing. When you started watching the show, you thought that the Master was going to be the main villain for the whole show, and then they got rid of him after the first season. So you wonder, “What’s the show going to do next?” In a cartoon show, you don’t have the same opportunity to change things up as often, but I thought that doing this special gave us the opportunity to bring the Cluster storyline to a conclusion. The best thing I can say about the special is that it opens up an alternate universe that you’ve never seen before where the whole world is full of robots.

DT: Do we learn anything new about Jenny or any of the other characters?

RR: Well, it’s more about what Jenny learns about herself. She’s kind of dissatisfied with her lot in life but when she is yanked away from everything, she has a chance to reevaluate where she fits into the scheme of things. Jenny comes to terms with who she is and what her purpose is. She grows up a little bit emotionally and as a character, too.

Renzetti learned that a character goes through visual changes over time from his experience working on such shows as Powerpuff Girls (left) and Dexter’s Laboratory (center). ™ & © 2001 Cartoon Network. An AOL Time Warner

We also get to see Brad be a real hero for the first time. We get to see Sheldon and Dr. Wakeman working together as a scientific tag-team. We reveal a bit about Wakeman’s past including a connection between her and Queen Vexus, which we’ll probably explore more in the series. We get to see Wakeman in action, something we’ve really haven’t done before. We give all the characters different circumstances than you would normally see them in. And, we get to meet a whole bunch of new characters on Cluster Prime that we’ve never met before.

DT: Nickelodeon has taken a few of its properties and developed them into theatrical features. Might there eventually be a Teenage Robot movie?

RR: I would love to do that someday but that’s kind of beyond my control. It would depend on how popular the show becomes over the long term. Actually, I love working in TV. I’ve loved a lot of animated movies that have come out but what I like about working in TV is having the ability to do a series of stories with the same characters and explore all these different storylines in their world. And if one doesn’t work so well, you’ve got another twenty to work with. Having said that, after working on several stories of Teenage Robot, it would be great to do a story worthy of a feature-length film.