The Point Radio: ROBOT CHICKEN ROBOT CHICKEN Still Playing After All These Years

This week, it’s time for another ROBOT CHICKEN Holiday Special, plus the wrap up of another season of the Cartoon Network hit series. Show runners John Harvavtine and Matt Senrich talk about how much fun it still is playing with toys, plus Brooke Burns has a new trivia challenge TV show and a new co-star known as The Beast and she explains it all here with us.

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Transcript

The Point Radio. It's Mike Raub crawling back from under the weather with a look at what everybody's going to be talking about this week, that robot chicken special. And we'll talk to the guys about not only making that, but how much fun it still is to sit around and play with toys all day.

Plus, Brooke Burns is back on TV, this time with something called The Chase, and she brought along the Beast. I'll let her explain that. Let's get to The Point. This is The Point.

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Radio. It's that time again, another robot chicken holiday special is on the way, and soon after, the premiere of yet another season on Adult Swim. I talked to executive producer John Harvey and co-creator Matt Sunrise about how they keep it fresh season after season.

And according to the guys, it's all in the grand tradition of another TV series legend. I compare it to SNL. It's a sketch comedy show. You know, people write sketches and you submit them and we vote on them. Yeah, everybody sits at their computers, typing stuff up at the end of the, you know,

from like 9 a.m. to 4, everyone's writing. 4 o'clock, everybody gets distributed packets. You read through the packets, you see what you like. We vote on them. If they're voted, it goes into the next round, if you will, where it's going to get scripted.

Or we give notes and say, hey, punch it up like this and bring it back to us tomorrow. Or you know, hey, this is terrible, don't ever think about it again. So once again, rumors out there of a robot chicken movie. Is that true? We always talk about it.

And it's tricky because like if we're going to do long form, it has to be very specific. Like doing an ADD show more than 11 minutes. Can you handle that? Throws you kind of off. It's a big screen like that.

Probably the closest thing to it is Jackass the movie. But if we're going to do it, like we did a bitch-putting special this season, I think we can expand. If we take like a specific character, I think there's something to that. A little more of a story.

Again, Simpsons didn't have a movie until what, season 20 something? Family Guy still hasn't had a movie. Like we got time. We enjoy the television world. And if we're going to do a movie, we'll do something else.

Of course, the guest voices on the show have continued to be amazing. I was curious as to whether it was always easy to get the big names to come and play along. How did that work even in the beginning? First season was a lot of begging because nobody knew what it was.

We were like, yeah, we're a sketch comedy show with action figures. We're 11 minutes and everyone's like, what are you talking about? But we got lucky. So we called out a lot of favorites from Seth and people Seth had worked with. And I think it was like a series of people.

We got like the whole cast of Scooby Doo to do it, which was like Sarah Michelle Geller and Freddie Prince and all those guys. And then Bert Reynolds and Dom Deluise had come in because Seth had just done a movie with them. And then Charlize Theron came in because they had just done a telling job.

So all these people came in. And then once we had that roster, people were like, oh, we should be a part of that. And then by the time it actually came out, people were starting to follow us and like come to us saying they wanted to do the show. And that that's been the most amazing thing.

Like, you know, Christians later stalked one of our writers at a party saying how much you love the show. And we're like, all right, you're gonna be on the show. This is great. So over the seasons, is there any show they haven't tackled yet?

You know, we keep talking about Ben 10. Like that's the one we haven't really cracked yet. Like it's that it's that next generation because we're a little older. People know it very well. It's very popular.

And yet, man, we just cannot figure out the way to make that the funny sketch. We've written like 10 that just get thrown out. But yeah, it's that's probably the biggest one. How about celebrity backlash and what they do? I was curious about if that ever comes up.

I talked to writer and voice actor Breckenmeyer. No matter what our skits are, it's it's done at a fun like I think there is a general fan vibe to what we do. And we did the when I wrote the Emperor's phone call, we were really worried because you don't mess with Star Wars.

You know, they're they're litigious. But George embraced it and it was being passed around Lucasfilm. And suddenly we get word that, you know, we're being invited up there to hang out with George. I mean, so and I think it's because the same thing. It wasn't done malicious.

It wasn't someone going like, hey, stop fucking with the reissues, you know, whatever. The robot chicken, lots of holiday specials premieres December 7th. See that on Adult Swim and a lot more to it. Adult Swim dot com. The point, Radio.

Wow, we go away for a few days and look at all that's happened. Here's the latest in pop culture. Guillermo del Toro confirmed over the weekend that his screenplay for the adaptation of Justice League Dark has been completed and been sent to those who matter at Warner Brothers for reading and for notes as well.

Two other factors about the project. First of all, is that it will not be set in the same continuity as the television series Constantine, which has its own challenges in the ratings department right now. And there's no idea when this would be on a schedule for Warner Brothers movies as well. It was not named in the master schedule.

They released just about a month ago, but it possibly could be on the list sometime around 2020 or perhaps a couple of years before that. Well, it is the season, not just for Santa and Ho Ho Ho, but also for those lists of the best of the year, most of which we'll be seeing in almost every particular category over the next few weeks.

The folks at Maker Studios, along with the social platform Wikia, have created the 2014 Year in Fandom. It is a video series celebrating the year's top trends in our particular genre, including things like New York Comic Con, The Fault in Our Stars, Disney's Frozen, Walking Dead, and a lot more.

There will be several of these and the first one is already debuted this week on the year in fandom.wikia.com or on the MakerGen YouTube channel. Just in other cases, the numbers being almost anything you'd like them to be. Some analysts report that Black Friday retail sales were down about 11% when compared to 2013, but for the gaming and TV industry, good news, the hottest holiday gift so far

this year has been video streaming devices. Just about 25% of the electronic gifts bought so far this year include Chromecast, Roku, and of course Apple TV as well as gaming consoles. Well, not necessarily a huge surprise, but one that certainly will get some folks in your home a little interested, and that is the possibility of a Frozen sequel, at least

according to actress Adina Menzel who said that she thinks there's one in the works. Adina said this as part of a UK-based newspaper interview in a publication called The Telegraph, saying that she would certainly like to be involved in the project. Latest word from Disney is there's no sequel in progress, however that could certainly change at any moment.

A lot of reporters will start this story out by saying it sounds like a movie and I have to admit it certainly does. Over the week, a group calling itself the Guardians of Peace, or GOP, hacked into Sony's internal network and froze all their computers with a screen that said hacked by hashtag GOP and a ticking clock for Sony to meet their demands before sensitive data was released

to the world. Over the weekend, a number of the films from Sony, some of which have not hit theaters yet, were released to the internet including Brad Pitt's war movie Fury, which is currently in theaters, and the upcoming Jamie Foxx and Cameron Diaz remake of Annie as well. No word yet on officially why this happened, although there are some pretty wild rumors

out there that it possibly involves the James Franco Seth Rogen film called The Interview, which has upset a few folks in North Korea, who said publicly they plan on taking some retribution toward the folks at Sony because of the film. News and reality show host Brooke Burns has returned to a new project and this time she brought some back up.

Brooke is the host of The Chase, a new Emmy nominated hit series at Pitts America's top trivia teams against the ultimate quiz genius, a guy known as the Beast. I ask her how all this works. It's one of the greatest trivia shows I've ever seen. We have speed and multiple choice rounds where we play our contestants, our American contestants

play against a British genius and they're playing for up to $250,000. That guy would be the Beast. His name is Mark Lebet, aka the Beast. He's also, happens to be 6'7", 370 pounds, so he's a Beast physically and mentally. He has three different degrees.

He's a math savant and has a photographic memory, so he's a tough opponent to come on and try to beat. He's a trivia expert. Yeah, trivia is kind of his life, but a little interesting fact about him. Before he started doing The Chase UK, he was actually a substitute math teacher.

Yeah, so he's an educator, really. And he says, when I asked him about it, I said, how do you know all of this? He goes, you know, when I was growing up, I just thought that everybody else was like me. Once I read something, I remember it.

I'm like, no, Beastie, not everybody's like that. Like a lot of good American television, this is based on a British show, right? Sure, yeah. They've been a huge success over in the UK. They've done up to over 600 episodes, I think, already, and won a couple of awards.

The amazing Bradley Walsh, who's a great actor and comedian, is hosting the show over there. And they have multiple chasers, or geniuses, as we like to say. They rotate them out. Whereas on the American show, obviously, hosted by a female, moi. And Beastie is our only chaser.

So they really try to, I think, play on the strengths of our relationship and the fun that we have together and sort of building that relationship over the course of the show, as well as our incredibly strong game format. But the format itself is the same, because it's so great, you know, how it goes. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

You last spoke with Brooke, she was involved with Motor City Masters. And I asked her, why make the change from reality to a more traditional game show? For me, Motor City Masters was about working with Luna Murray, a company that I highly respect and I was interested in working with. And then, them presenting a show to me that was an area that I had absolutely zero expertise

in. So really, I just went, I wanted to go and learn and spotlight these amazing American minds in the world of car design. Also just bringing attention to the city of Detroit after, you know, the hard times that they've been through, I thought was really cool and fascinating.

And you know, I'm always wanting to learn new things. So for me, that was an educational experience, for sure. And as far as her acting roles go, anything coming up? I'm actually going to be working with Hallmark again this Christmas and into the new year on a couple of films that they are adapting from a series of books.

A Gourmet Detective series, which is really fun. So yes, obviously the chase right now is in first position. We're in the middle of shooting our fourth season. But then in my free time, I like to jump up to Vancouver and do a little work for those guys because Hallmark has been so wonderful to me and I just really enjoy working for

them. New episodes of The Chase every Tuesday on the Game Show Network. And you can catch Brooke's holiday movie, The Most Wonderful Time of the Year, showing all this month on the Hallmark Channel. That does it for the podcast, but before you go back to watch that Star Wars teaser one

more time. Keep in mind we're just a couple of bookmarks away every couple of days with everything you need in pop culture. On websites like ComicMix dot com, MichaelDavisWorld dot com, GetThePointRadio dot com, and of course in the iTunes podcast directory.

On social media we're under the point radio on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. And we'll see you right back here in just a couple of days.