The showrunner reveals how he brought to the small screen DC Studios co-president James Gunn’s passion project, an all-new adult animated dark comedy that tracks a secret team of incarcerated monsters recruited for missions deemed too dangerous for humans, now streaming on Max.
Between the new Harley Quinn, Kite Man, and now Creature Commandos animated series, Warner Bros. Animation and DC have created three enjoyable new shows. Creature Commandos, which debuted yesterday, December 5 on Max, marks the first new DCU show under James Gunn’s watch. Gunn has pushed out an aggressive set of reboots, reimaginings, whatever moniker you wish, to hopefully usher in a successful new slate of DC properties across film and TV. With humor and, hopefully, cohesive storytelling. His track record amply illustrates he’s up to the task. And if initial takes are meaningful, Creature Commandos presents a strong first step.
The 7-episode Season 1 stars Steve Agee, Maria Bakalova, Anya Chalotra, Zoë Chao, Frank Grillo, Sean Gunn, David Harbour, Alan Tudyk, Indira Varma, and Viola Davis.
Check out the trailer:
For veteran Dean Lorey, EP and showrunner on both Harley Quinn and Kite Man, hopping onto Commandos as showrunner wasn’t as difficult as one might have guessed. Lorey came onto the project after Gunn had finished writing the first season. The idea for the series started with Gunn before taking over as DC Studios co-president. “James had written the first four episodes of the show prior to taking the helm because he had wanted to sell it as a series,” Lorey says. “It was like a passion project. It just was something he was excited to do. Then he became the co-president of DC, which made the path to it getting picked up a lot easier.”
“They were looking for someone to run it,” he continues. “James was a fan of Harley Quinn. In fact, he's in Harley Quinn. In one of the episodes, he plays himself. So that's really where I came into it. And then he wrote the three remaining episodes. So, it was fun because he didn't want to go into production until everything was written, which was great because I was also finishing up Kite Man and Harley Season 5.”
Gunn made it clear from the beginning that he considers the Commandos series canon. So, the production took on greater weight than Harley Quinn and Kite Man, which are not canon. According to Lorey, “When we started working on it, one of the things I wanted to do was make sure that we found a clear visual distinction from Harley and the other animated shows. And our animation supervisor, Rick Morales, did an amazing job. We decided to go for an Eastern European vibe with a gothic bent, but also very lush. That was our North star.”
But what made Commandos materially different for Lorey is that unlike on Harley Quinn and Kite Man, he didn’t write it. “I'm used to writing the stuff that I produce,” he shares. “This is the first time that I've ever just purely produced a show. And it was great. James was a terrific partner, and he was very, very specific about what he wanted where, and what characters were involved. He's got a future mapped out in his head about what the DCU is going to be. I don't know it. He hasn't shared it with me, but it's been a great process and a great project to work on.”
Lorey acknowledges not shouldering the writing took some pressure off, noting that writing, especially coherent writing, is never easy. “It’s hard,” he says. “It can be rewarding, but man, it’s tough to sit down and write.”
“We really just tried to produce the best possible version of those scripts,” he adds. “James was very involved in every step of the way. So, whenever there was something, like if he wanted to add a character in the background of a scene, we would do it, but not always know why. He would just say, ‘I have something in mind,’ and then he’d detail it for us. So, he was very, very on top of all that. It took a lot of the pressure off us because we didn't have to figure it out ourselves. He knew what he wanted, and we did it and tried to do a great job.”
Regarding the show’s tone and design, Lorey shares that the production essentially started from scratch. “We have a lot of completely new characters. So that was the starting point. But we brought in the French animation studio Bobbypills. They were enormously helpful. All the designs were a combination of Warner Bros. Animation and Bobbypills working together. And some of them were tricky, like GI Robot. We went through a lot of iterations for him. First of all, we wanted it to feel throwbacky, so its DNA is in the 40s. But we also wanted a certain amount of humanity to come through as well. So, it was tricky. There was a lot of design work. And for Frankenstein, the key question was, ‘How much does he look like classic Frankenstein?’ We felt like we needed to embrace his design DNA, but still change it up a little bit. And the same was true of The Bride. They're not purely classic versions of those characters, but I like where we landed.”
Like many shows adapted from comic books, Commandos is quite bloody. And with monsters, you add layers of gore and scariness. Asked how he arrived at what he felt was the “right” amount of action and violence, Lorey says, “Well, it came from the scripts. Stuff was described very clearly in the scripts. But we were working from the point of view that it's an R-rated show, which I was very comfortable with having done Harley and Kite Man. And we wanted to make the action and violence ‘hurt.’ You can get away with more in animation than you can with live-action because there is a little bit of a distance that you feel. So, in some places, we decided to, I don't know, ‘push’ the envelope a little bit. But by and large, we wanted it to feel real and we wanted it to hurt.”
As far as overall challenges, Lorey shares, “To tell you the truth, the birth of this show was very easy. It's always tough doing the first season of a show, To me, usually the toughest part is tone because tone is a very tricky thing to nail. But the scripts were clear on tone, and we kept it very pacey, which was something that I took from Harley Quinn as well as the voice direction. We tried to pace everything up to cut it tight. So, it ended up being relatively easy. A lot of the music choices were in the script, for example. Virtually all the songs in the episodes were placed where they are in the script. I was concerned about working with an outside studio like Bobbypills and how we would incorporate them into our production. But it ended up being very easy. I was surprised because that was the thing I was most worried about. Like, how do you make sure that everybody feels seen and heard when presenting competing ideas? But it all worked much better than I thought it would.”
Noting early reactions to the show have been tremendous, Lorey concludes by saying, “The initial reception that we've been getting to the show has been through the roof. And look… if people like monsters and like R-rated material with a little bit of comedy, I think we're the show for them.”
Dan Sarto is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.
