Actor David Harbour’s terrific performance helped reshape the famed monster into a poetic, lovesick, deadly and slightly delusional creature on the just-renewed animated DC Studios series that combines gothic horror with dynamic action and sharp humor.
During the course of his career, Warner Bros. Animation's Rick Morales has worked on series like The Batman, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Justice League the New Frontier, Young Justice, and Ultimate Spider-Man, including as director on Beware The Batman and Max’s recent Kite Man: Hell Yeah!.
But Morales says that James Gunn’s Creature Commandos is “without a doubt, one of the best, if not the best written shows I’ve ever been a part of.”
“James finds the humanity, the real humanity, in these characters,” says Morales in an interview with AWN just before a preview screening of the series at this year’s SCAD AnimationFest. “He hits the core of them and it’s not cliche. It feels real. It’s what James does and it's all over the place in Creature Commandos. And that's what makes it good.”
Morales serves as supervising producer on Creature Commandos, a show that takes the best of anime like Cowboy Bebop and Golgo 13 and mixes them with films like The Dirty Dozen and Bride of Frankenstein.
The series, which tracks a secret team of incarcerated monsters recruited for missions deemed too dangerous for humans, is written and executive produced by Gunn based on DC characters and produced by DC Studios and Warner Bros. Animation. Additional executive producers include Peter Safran, Dean Lorey, and Sam Register. On the show, now streaming on Max with Episode 5 just released yesterday, December 26, Morales also works alongside Peter Girardi, EVP of special programming at Warner Bros. Animation. Earlier this week, the show was renewed for a second season. You can read AWN’s interview with Lorey here.
“They're canonical characters but, in a way, they're also not,” says Girardi of the Creature Commandos leads. “Rick and I work on a lot of Batman movies and things with the main Justice League characters, and that comes along with a fair amount of history and weight. But when we worked on Kite Man, it was great because we were creating a new character that exists inside the DCU but is also our eyes into the universe as a misfit character. And Creature Commandos is what James did with Guardians of the Galaxy. Fans are meeting these characters for the first time, like these characters are meeting each other for the first time, and onboarding with them into this larger Marvel universe.”
Creature Commandos stars Steve Agee as misfit commandos leader Economos; Zoe Chao as the good-hearted amphibious human Nina Mazursky; Alan Tudyk as inflamed skeleton Dr. Phosphorus; Sean Gunn as nazi-hating GI Robot and feral Weasel; as well as Indira Varma as the zombified Bride and David Harbour as Eric Frankenstein.
“The thing for me, even before Rick came on board, was the depth of the character work that James brings to a project,” notes Girardi. “The genre elements of any DC project are great, and that's table stakes. But when there's actual characters there that you can care about and you understand or you're surprised by how they might react in a typical situation, that's fantastic. And it gets all of us excited because then we have to bring something new to the animation. We have to figure out new ways to have those characters emote and carry themselves.”
There is no better example of this than the Frankenstein monster known as “Eric” who Harbour helped craft the moment he stepped into the recording booth. “Rick, myself, James and Peter Safford at DC, we all found these characters together and, with Frankenstein, we were initially thinking of taking it in a totally different direction then where we ended up,” shares Girardi. “Because of some of the Grant Morrison books that James had done, we worked very closely with the publishing team as well. And we had an idea that Frankenstein would be more of this historical misfit that's been around for a long time.”
Morales adds, “We thought he would also be like a warrior, a much more aggro and competent, harder, experienced and monster-type of character.”
Girardi continues, “And he's not like that at all in the show.”
In the original comic story of DCU’s “Bride and Frankenstein,” Bride's relationship with Frankenstein was loving; the couple had attempted to create a son through government organization S.H.A.D.E.’s (Super-Human Advanced Defense Executive) technology. However, their son was very unstable and violent, and attacked Bride, forcing Frankenstein to kill his own child. Despite what their offspring had done, Bride saw that her son was only terrified of its situation and couldn’t forgive Frankenstein for his actions.
The pair shares a similar story of murder and unforgiveness in the Max series, with Bride being created by Victor Frankenstein as an intended bride for his zombified “son” Eric. However, Bride is terrified of Eric and seeks solace with Victor. The scientist and his corpse-crafted creation end up having sex on Victor’s operating table and Eric catches them in the act. Eric kills Victor, declares his love for Bride, and Bride, understandably mortified, attempts to kill Eric and flees. Eric then proceeds to follow her throughout the decades trying to win her love, when they’re not too busy punching each other in the face.
Harbour’s voice acting for the poetic, lovesick, deadly and slightly delusional Frankenstein – as eager to marry and make friends as he is to kill – includes very precise word pronunciation devoid of contractions that feels fittingly forced, especially considering his character is a mashup of corpses and whose brain may not be completely all there. Still, Frankenstein is a logical thinker, and extremely well spoken, but totally blinded by love; he changes from a wise poet to a raging, crying mess whenever Bride and love are involved. Think Kronk from The Emperor's New Groove if he was an educated professor…and electrocuted to life by a mad, horny scientist.
“When David first recorded for Eric Frankenstein, it was jarring,” says Morales. “I was like, ‘Whoa. That is so unexpected.’ The tone of it, the way he carried himself, the read of the lines, every choice was surprising. It was an odd take on the character, but also brilliant.”
Girardi agrees, adding, “That was when we really found the character. It was not how a Frankenstein would typically react to a situation, which was great because it was surprising. It was something people hadn’t seen before, and it blew my mind. And there is a vulnerability there, which I think James is great at, creating the vulnerability that are in these characters, no matter how super heroic and strong they present themselves. In whatever situations, there's a lot of vulnerability.”
Working with animation studio Bobbypills in Paris, Girardi and Morales with Gunn and the rest of the team created character designs for the series’ creatures – especially Frankenstein – that allowed for a wide range of emotional expression.
“We had to go back and make sure that his facial structure could perform in the way David was performing the lines,” says Girardi. “Some characters, like GI Robot, obviously aren’t as affected by that tone shift, but we wanted the highs and lows and ups and downs of David’s performance to be shown in Frank’s face.”
Looney Tunes and squash and stretch methods were big inspirations, Girardi notes, for creating a Frankenstein with “the ability to be violently enraged and also act like a petulant three-year-old.”
“It was a lot of back and forth with Bobbypills,” says Morales. “They had their team of artists there in France and we had our team of artists here in Burbank. There were some characters where it was just knocked out of the park on the first try. Nina was one of those where she was very close right off the bat, and it was really just about refining the shapes in her face to get to the innocence that's in that character. Bride went through a lot of iterations. But you have a lot of leeway to create with these kinds of characters. Unless you’re doing some weird alternate reality version of Batman or something, you don’t have the same freedom there.”
Girardi and Morales say the series’ designs and tone landed in a sweet spot somewhere between anime and French science fiction, with plenty of gore. And they can’t wait for audiences to see more episodes.
“I’d say check out Episode 2 for the action and Episode 4 just because it’s an overall favorite for everyone on our team,” says Morales. “The entire cast also adores Episode 3.
It’s honestly best just to watch them all.
“These are a bunch of C and D list characters that you would never really expect to care all that much about,” notes Morales. “To be honest, when it was brought to me, this collection of heroes, I was like, ‘What is this?’ But then I got the scripts for the entire series. I thought I’d read through one or two of these scripts and I ended up reading everything in one night. I like the idea that we're dealing with characters that aren't household names, and it's expected that the audience will look at them and go, ‘Why are they making this?’ But, if they watch it, I think there are some new standouts that will be bigger characters within the DC Universe because of this show.”
Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
