Drew Carey’s Green Screen Show had a shooting star trajectory on The WB network during the waning months of 2004. It was bright and brief, and despite the best wishes of its faithful (albeit small) audience, the show was quietly shelved after airing only five of its 12 episodes. Some say the show was not promoted properly, and others merely hoped it would be given time to find its niche. Regardless, it seemed that the first full season would not see the light of screen, and the prospects dimmed for a future of eclectic primetime independent animation.

Then, in the spring of 2005, the Green Screen Show was given new life as Comedy Central decided to acquire the hybrid improv-animation program. Presently, the Green Screen Show is in rotation during Monday afternoons (2:00 pm) and Tuesday evenings (7:00 pm), and one can watch the first season in its entirety.

The following interview with Drew Carey came on the heels of the show’s birth, over a year ago. It is a little memory in a bottle, floating back to us now across oceans of time.

Greg Proops improvs in “Zeppelin” (animation directed by Scott Ingalls, Acme Filmworks) on Drew Carey’s Green Screen Show. © International Mammoth Television Inc.

Greg Singer: What’s the history of the Green Screen Show, in terms of how you came up with the idea and pursued it?

Drew Carey: I don’t know… There were a couple of commercials on TV that I thought were really cool. Remember that NFL one where they would put things on people’s heads, like the machine on top of the coach, or something like that, to make it look like a computer head… and then the Microsoft commercial where they would show kids dreaming about what they wanted to do when they got older, like conducting an orchestra or whatever. So, there was that, and then I had done some greenscreen work a couple of months before, so I had greenscreen in my mind, I think.

I was on stage one night, and they were doing [the improvisational game] Moving People, and I thought it was going really well. I thought, wow, wouldn’t this be great if you just saw them moving around, you could just see them in their environment. It was like a vision so strongly in my head as I was watching it from the back wall, I thought, oh, we could put them in greenscreen suits on a greenscreen stage, and we could get rid of everything. I thought we could do a whole show like that. Everything we do, we could just put a greenscreen down. So that idea was in November (2003), and I kind of let it sit in my head over the holidays, because nobody’s doing much anyway.

Around the first of the year, I called my agent and stuff, and started meeting with Ron [Diamond, founding exec producer of Acme Filmworks] in February. We had a nice conversation for two-and-a-half hours. I just didn’t realize how complicated it all was. So, thank God, I partnered up with someone who knows what the hell he’s doing. I’d be so lost otherwise. That first meeting when we were at Dalt’s [restaurant], when we were talking about how far away everything (the green) had to be from the performers, and all that shit, and they had brought all these models, and I was, like, “What?” I thought you just threw some green behind us. Even on The Drew Carey Show, when we did greenscreen, we had green already set up, and we’d just lower the curtain and do our little thing, for driving scenes and stuff like that.

GS: Those were backplates, you didn’t have to worry about three-dimensional objects.

DC: Exactly. All that stuff.

GS: What other experiences have you had with cartoons?

DC: We did a thing on The Drew Carey Show where I did a scene with Daffy Duck. They had air guns set up all over the stage that would make papers fly, and they had a tiny Daffy Duck I would talk to. We did tons of special effects on The Drew Carey Show. Every season we would do something crazy.