 |
S.K: I had been working in animation for a little bit, but I hadn’t been a director or producer director. I had done freelance as a storyboard artist, but I hadn’t even had a full time in house storyboard position, and when I was working at Disney …I pitched a show to them, and someone said, “Well, you have to get an agent if you’re going to pitch shows.”
So now I have an agent, and he asked what I wanted to do and I said, “You know, I’ve always wanted to direct.” Ever since I was little I remember seeing E.T at the drive in theater and asking my dad, “Why is that so good? Like, why is it so different than everything else?” And he’s like, “Well, it’s because of the director,” and my uncle was a stage director on Broadway so my dad knew a little bit about what directing actually is.
 |
| Seth Kearsley. Photo credit to IMDB.com |
So my agent sent me to meet DIC on this show, and I was like, “There’s no way I’m getting this job.” Because, I keep saying I was 23, but Mummies actually premiered in ‘97? So it was maybe like, ‘95 or ‘96 when we actually started making it. So I was somewhere around 24 or 25, something like that, and I’d never had a job as a storyboard artist even, much less having directed individual episodes on a show, much less a whole series. So the guy that was interviewing me, he laid out this schedule, that if I’d known anything, I would have known that this was a nightmare schedule, but I didn’t, and so he’s like, “Okay, it’s two episodes a week, and then about midway through, it’s gonna go to three episodes a week.” It’s 42 half hours in a year and a half and you’re going to be the only director.” And he’s like, “So you know that means at one point you’re gonna be working on like, 26 different episodes at the same time?” And he’s like, “So what do you think?” And without even batting an eye I was like, “Yeah, no, that sounds good!” just completely bluffing, you know, thinking if they give me this job and I just totally mess it up, it’s kind of their fault because I’ve never even directed before and they’re giving me an entire series. So that’s how I got the job.
MB: I’ve read that you’ve said you had ideas for about 30 premises for a second season. Can you tell us anything about those?
S.K: Well I thought that there was a lot of things that we did in the first season that I really liked and was really proud of, like that Presley, being the descendent of an Egyptian Pharaoh, wasn’t a blonde haired blue eyed kid, which is what they were originally trying to do. So we were calling it--to get across the executives--racially ambiguous, like maybe he’s a kid with brown hair and he just has a good tan, but you know, maybe also he’s Egyptian? Because you know, he’s supposed to be a descendant. Also, having Presley’s dad being kind of like a Disneyland dad that shows up once in a while and goes and does something fun.
So in the second season, I thought that instead of doing what shows usually did, where it’s like the characters are stuck in time, that I would make it that it’s the next year and Presley’s 13 now, so now he’s Pharaoh. He’s not just the boy prince. And that he would get armor. You know, it’s funny that there are actually toys of Presley with armor.
MB: That’s what I was going to ask, was that the design for season 2?
S.K: No, I didn’t even know they were doing that.
The connection with Hasbro early on was like, when we were doing early on the very initial designs, they sent some guys out to talk about the concept art and stuff, and then there was a point where they sent us designs for these Shabti guys that had purple on them instead of the blue ones that we’d been doing, and we’re like “Oh my god, those are so much cooler!” So then we just incorporated them into the show as super Shabti. They switch color and they get a little bit more angular and they look a little more bad-ass.
Going back to your second season question, I thought, you know there are mummies in a bunch of different cultures, so it would be awesome to open it up to some of those other cultures and maybe see the same kind of like, mummy guardians in those other cultures and especially you know, for the Chinese, there’s that army of clay soldiers that exists and it was like, “Ah, that’d be so cool to do something with those guys!”
 |
| Concepts for various season 2 characters |
and I did some designs for them, like these guys. Some were others, like this was a fan character that we really liked.
 |
| Concept for a female Gazelle mummy based off of a fan character |
So having a Chinese part to it, and also an Aztec part to it, and just looking at different places around the world where mummies are part of the culture, and pyramids and things like that. Really broadening the world so it wasn’t just Egyptology, but brought in other cultures.
MB: That’s a great idea.
S.K: Yeah, well it never happened, I never even got a chance to pitch it, because they only ever planned on doing forty-two. And maybe if they didn’t have this little independent sci-fi film that they were making toys for-- Star Wars--maybe they would’ve given our toys a little more shelf space. The Mummies toys came out at the exact same time that the re-release of the Star Wars toys came out and so it was impossible to find them. You’d have a whole aisle of Star Wars and then there’d be like on little boop somewhere else in the toy department.
MB: You once mentioned that Presley’s mom, Amanda, was going to get clued in on the mummies. How was this going to happen?
S.K: I always thought that it was a little odd that she didn’t know. It just felt like a lame conceit, so I thought that there should be some kind of moment where she finds out, and then I thought that it might also be cool if she and Ja-Kal ended up like, having feelings for each other. It sounds so stupid to say.
MB: That sounds cool, because Ja-Kal’s sort of a father figure. (For Presley)
S.K: Yeah, and also like, Ja-kal’s story is so sad, that he lost everything. He had a wife and a kid and you know, for the others, it’s a little like, “Oh wow this is awesome! We’re living in this new place!” and with Ja-Kal we always kept calling back to that cloth that his wife gave him on the last day. It was always just like, “Oooh, it’s so sad!” It would’ve been nice to have you know, a happier ending for him. And whether it would be a real thing, or I don’t know, we just finished watching Spider-Man: Far from Home, and it could be like Aunt May and Happy. Maybe nothing ever actually happens, but they kind of act as a parental unit for him.
MB: Did you have any plans to bring back Arakh and Kimas?
S.K: Yeah, I mean, anything that was cool in the first season I would definitely want to bring back. I really liked Set’s design
MB: I loved Set and Anubis.
S.K: Yeah, Set and Anubis, but they always had them kind of be bumbling idiots, and I thought it’d be so much cooler to have them be cooler. There were a lot of things in the show that were like, because it was a toy driven thing, there were a lot of things that we couldn’t not have. They just decided that these shows need to have a catch phrase every time they transform because He-man said something. And they’ve gotta have all of these different vehicles to get around town. I always thought, “How lame is it that Ja-Kal hops in the dragster to cruise around the streets of San Francisco when he can fly? Like, why would he ever drive?”
I thought Nefertina’s bike was really cool, and I actually grabbed a box, I just pulled it out of my shed. So this is one of my toys from when I was a kid. It’s a G.I Joe motorcycle that has a spot for instead of a side car, it’s like a Gatling gun that’s supposed to attach to the side. So that shape of the front of the bike is totally the inspiration for the shape of the front of her bike.
 |
| Photo credit to Flickr.com |
 |
| Photo credit to generalsbornagainjoes.com |
It almost sort of has a falcon kind of look, and I was like, “How cool would it be if there were wings there that were like fwooosh.” So that was the one toy design that I got to have an influence on.
MB: So you collaborated some on the toys right?
S.K: Yeah, some.
MB: I heard a rumor once that they were originally supposed to include Nefertina with her bike instead of the Ja-Kal variant. Was there any truth to this?
S.K: So I don’t know all of the story with the toys, because we were kind of separate, but what I heard in the beginning was that they weren’t going to even release a Nefertina because they thought like, it’s a boys action show. You know, no girls are gonna watch this show so they’re not gonna want the toy.
MB: That’s odd since she was part of the main crew.
S.K: Yeah, how could you not? But, you know, it was the 90s. There were weird things with the toys like, this is the Skycophagus, but see this piece right here? And this piece right here? Those are totally off of one of those land speeders from The Empire Strikes Back that are on Hoth.
 |
| Photo credit to FigureRealm.com |
Because they basically when they’re designing these things they have a bunch of spare parts from all of the other toys that they’ve designed so they start mocking it up with different pieces, but like, these are totally exactly that mold. Like, they didn’t even do a new mold for it.
MB: I’ve seen that a lot in He-Man when they reuse the molds
S.K: Yeah, and then it does the wing thing.
MB: Skycophagus was always my favorite vehicle
S.K: Yeah, this was really cool, and it was the most on brand and stuff. And then it was lame that like, I lost all of the disks but it has the disks and you push the button there and the disks shoot. So we ended up having to do that in the show like, they would fire these disks out of the Skycophagus. It was like, really? That’s kind of lame. They could be firing like, magic lightning bolts out of it, but they’re gonna shoot these basically manhole covers.
MB: So, back to season 2, was Presley going to look older, or have the same design once he turned 13?
S.K: I probably would’ve aged him up just a little bit. I don’t have my, you know, when you’re coming to the end of a season, you spend a lot of time in post house, where they’re doing like, color correction and on lining, and you know, Mummies was painted on cells and shot on film and so sometimes they were like, in the post house they were fixing scratches in the film and stuff like that. So it was super boring, and so that’s why I just had a sketchbook where I would write down ideas for the next season, knowing already that they weren’t planning on doing another season.
That’s why they did 42 in the first season, because 42 gets you to syndication, that’s all they need. You know, if it had been like a runaway hit maybe they would’ve done more, and I’ve thought about, the company has changed hands a couple of times since I was there and I’ve thought about talking to I think it’s uh, FDX I wanna say? I’ve thought about reaching out to them and saying like, “Hey! Mummies would be a cool show from the 90s that you actually own the rights to!”
If we did a redo, you know, there were some things that we did, like the water guy, you know, the technology just wasn’t there to make that guy look super cool. We tried different things like we painted with a certain color and then we keyed out that color and could get this water ripple effect going on which looked really cool when it was just on a single frame, but when you did it across the whole thing it just looked weird.
MB: I know you kind of alluded to this with the gazelle character and the other mummies but were there any new characters you wanted to introduce in season 2?
S.K: Well, I mean the big introduction would’ve been all of the mummies from the different cultures and maybe having like, the museum hosts an exhibition of the Chinese things. And you know, so it keeps coming through San Francisco and you could have moments where like, our team and their team are battling and then they realize, “ Wait, we’re on the same side. “ And maybe there would’ve been a prince for each of those or a princess or something like that. That would’ve been cool. You have to realize that all of this stuff, all these ideas were, they were definitely before you were born. I’m trying to recall the scribbling in the back of the post facility but it would’ve been cool just to have like, an Aztec themed ones, or Chinese themed ones.
MB: Were there any further plans for Apep?
S.K: I didn’t specifically have one for him, probably because those were hard episodes to get through, because you know, if it was a Nefertina centric story, they were less into it.
MB: Is there anything else you want to say on how season 2 would’ve gone?
S.K: I mean, that’s really kind of all I can remember. If we were to do it again now, I think I would probably make the whole thing just a little more serious. They really wanted it to be an action/comedy, so you know, we sometimes poked fun at ourselves and in the first season I wrote, I think like 11 of the premises and my premises would be the ones where it was like, this is the episode where they shrink, because our art design department was dying, and I was like, well if they shrink we can have a whole episode inside the sphinx. Then there was another episode where the toy company kept wanting us to do the shriek mode. And the reason for that is the group that was assembled to do Mummies was the same team that did The Real Ghostbusters, so it was Ivan Reitman and Hasbro and DIC. With the extreme Ghostbusters toys, the fright feature where it would be like Egon, and all the Ghostbusters guys would be like, “Aaaaah!” And their faces would bug out like that. Those sold really well. And so they really wanted to make more of that kind of toy. And it really felt like, shoehorned into Mummies, and so I wrote a premise for an episode called “Dark and Shrieky Night,” where they get stuck on the other side of the bay, and they completely lose all their powers. The only thing that they can do is the shriek mode and so we did it like 30 times in that episode and then after that they were like, “Yeah, you don’t have to do that anymore.”
 | |
| Rath and Ja-Kal in "A Dark and Shrieky Night" |
So it was like, “Yes! Success!” So, you know, I think if there was another season, or like, we shouldn’t be talking about it as another season. If there was a reboot, I would definitely not wanna have something like shriek mode, or other things where it’s like, the toy company forced something in like, this [Hot Ra] fits the whole team. It fits one character in the toy, but somehow we’ve gotta make it seat five in the show. And that this long thing is going up and down the streets of San Francisco. So we’d definitely change some of that.
MB: So moving on to the toys, so wave 2 that was only released internationally, kind of completed the set of core characters. We had all four mummies, Presley, Scarab and the Shabtis. Do you know what we would’ve gotten after that? Maybe like, Set and Anubis?
S.K: I don’t, because I didn’t even know that that was happening. They gave me a set of toys so I have my set of toys and I have everyone in boxes, so I have two sets, so I still have everyone in boxes and then I have everyone out of boxes, which my daughters have been playing with these a lot. But, with the toys, the Batman animated series was also happening around the same time, like it started a little before and their toys looked just like the show, and I was like, “How come Rath doesn’t look like that? This dude’s buff. You made him just another buff dude. Why can’t our toys look more like the show?” So yeah, I don’t know what they would’ve done. Maybe because I kept asking them questions like that, that’s when they stopped involving me in any of the toys
MB: So did they kind of pressure you to include things like shriek mode variants?
S.K : Yeah, the shriek mode, also like in that “My Dad the Hero” episode. I had them all take a separate mode of transportation to go fight the Super Scarab. Mostly so I could have him destroy all the vehicles. And you know, the coolest one that we designed they didn’t even make a toy of.
MB: The A- Nile-Ator?
S.K: A-Nile-Ator, yeah, I was like, “Why would we make anything else? Let’s make the A-Nile-ator and make it so that it transforms into a water craft, it’s a land craft, and it’s an air craft. It’s like, why would we do anything else?” And they’re like, “Well, because we need to have multiple toys that we can sell. We can’t just have the one toy.” I was like, “Well, just make different versions of that.”
MB: Where there ever any ideas for toys like A-Nile-Ator that didn’t get included in the first two waves?
S.K: I don’t think so, no. I mean, I really think that if it had been a different toy company maybe, I mean, Hasbro had done the Ghostbusters toys, but you know, Ghostbusters is coming off of a successful movie. But if it had been another toy company maybe they would’ve had a better plan for marketing the toys, and more of a long term goal, on what happens to the toys. I don’t know who made the Street Sharks toys, but that was another show that was being produced at DIC at the same time, and you know, there were ads all over the place for Street Sharks.
MB: Were there any vehicles that you designed that didn’t end up in the show?
S.K: No, cause I wasn’t really a fan of them like, cruising around in vehicles. I thought like, “Wouldn’t it be cool if they kind of shot their bandages out and kind of Spider-man’d around town? Or like, just levitated, like maybe Rath has magic powers where he can just fly around town?” And so I thought that the whole premise was so far-fetched that having them have to work on the Hot-Ra, and being so scientific, that that’s the car they would come up with, too.
MB: My last question is, the show was really good. It did have a good fan base. Why do you think the show and toy line kind of failed to catch on?
S.K: I mean, for the show, they only ever planned to do 42 but also, like, I don’t know how it was released everywhere else, but I know for us in LA--and I just assumed it was the same for everywhere else in the country--at the time there were morning cartoons and afternoon cartoons and then Saturday morning cartoons and that’s all you got. There wasn’t 24 hour cartoons yet, I think maybe Cartoon Network was just getting started, but they weren’t doing original content, it was all the old library, and Nickelodeon, I think was around, but it was more live action shows than animated shows. And Mummies was on here, on KCAL which is one of the local stations. Monday thru Thursday, so not even five days a week, and at like 7 in the morning, which, I mean you know that school starts at 8, right? 7 is not when you’re sitting down to watch cartoons. So you know, I think that if it had been on in the afternoons it would’ve had a better shot. If it had been Monday through Friday it would’ve had a better shot, and then you know, even for us on KCAL they changed the time, like, in the first run they kept changing when it was on. So you know, it was hard to find. And even now, after all this time, the most bizarre premiere party that we’ve ever had was for the show because even if the studio isn’t gonna do something, you want to get together and watch the show live on TV, even though you’ve seen the episodes a million times. So there we are at 7 in the morning at one of the production team’s house, and you know, they bust out the champagne for us to celebrate like, “The show’s on the air!” And it’s like, “I feel like I should be having coffee, it’s breakfast, not champagne.”
But I think that really, the show didn’t have a champion. You know, I think that Hasbro was more interested in their Star Wars line of characters. I think that the distributor, which is basically Hasbro, you know--it was called Claster, but it was owned by Hasbro--weren’t really behind it because it wasn’t coming off of a movie or something like that. DIC didn’t have an ownership stake in it, they were just making a series, and Ivan Reitman had much bigger projects that he was doing, like Mummies came about right after he did Space Jam. I remember going over to his office on the Universal lot, which you know, was just unbelievably cool but also like, he wasn’t really involved at all. It was some of the producers in his company that would give us notes and stuff, so there was no one to be like, “This is the show we’re making and we’re not gonna take anything!”
MB: Well, thank you so much for doing this. You did a great job on the show.
S.K: Thank you, it was a lot of hard work, you know. I tried to do something different. I still really like the transformation sequence. And the guy that animated that had animated on AEon Flux. The studio in Japan that we used for Mummies, we had two studios, one in Japan and one in Korea. And the studio in Japan, one of the reasons why we used them was because the most recent thing they did was AEon Flux for Peter Chung. We were like, “Oh my god! That’s totally what we want!” But you know, when they were making AEon Flux, Peter basically moved to Japan and basically lived at that studio the whole time it was going on and it was him and that other guy who were like, the creative power team on AEon Flux, and I wasn’t gonna go live in Japan or anything. You know, me of today would say to me of then, “You should totally go live in Japan while the show’s being made.” But at the time I was like,” I don’t know. I don’t wanna go to Japan.”
But yeah, there’s some cool stuff, there’s a lot of cringe stuff where it’s just like, “Oh my god, look at his eyes, his eyes are like moving while he’s talking. Why are they moving?” But a lot of that is because it’s animated on paper and then Xeroxed onto cells and then painted. It’s an antique process and it caused a lot of issues along the way, which, you know, the first show that I had worked on was already digital ink and paint and had a computer character setup, which was The Maxx.
M.B: Sorry, this just made me think of that, The Maxx. On an interview you said you’d sold a show called Thor: God of Thunder?
S.K: Yeah, well, we thought we sold the show.
M.B: Oh, I was trying to find it online.
S.K: I actually have a little video that we did. On my Youtube you can find a clip we did that is really bad video quality, but you know, it was done on 640x480 cause that’s the resolution that we had. But, it featured character designs by Mike Mignola, Gwen Murakami, and the writer just did like, a bunch of the Star Wars: Clone Wars series and Star Wars Rebels and now he’s EPing a series at Dreamworks. And the art director, he’s the guy who did all the backgrounds, and all the effects and everything, he just directed The Grinch and he’s directing another feature for Illumination. So yeah, it would have been a really kick-ass show, but it had one major drawback, which was that Fabio was the voice of Thor, but he actually put up the money for the promo piece that we did, and even to this day, I’ve never had someone say, “I believe in this enough and I’m going to put down the money. Let’s make it.” But we told them, you know, really the best way to sell the show is to make a little promo piece for it.
 |
| A picture from the Thor: God of Thunder promo video. Photo credit to Seth Kearsley. |
Multiple times we thought we had it sold, and then it turned out that it really seemed like it came down to that Fabio has a very thick Italian accent and people just weren’t buying that he was Thor. We even had Charlton Heston, he was gonna be the voice of Odin, so we were going to have this epic Hollywood legend and stuff. And we even got to go to his house and see he has all his costume designs from all of his movies like, the actual art, because he had used the same costume designer for all of his movies.
So yeah, It would have been a really cool show, but it never ended up happening. We thought we had at one point. We had a company that was like, ”We want to make a movie of it. Can you make it as a movie?” And we’re like, “We could totally make it as a movie!” So we came up with a movie storyline and wrote a script and everything and they took it to the film market in Santa Monica that year, and they were like, gonna get investors for it, and this is how crazy the stories go, but we didn’t hear anything from them right after, and we’re like, “What’s going on with these guys? How come we haven’t heard anything?” And then Fabio’s manager got a call from one of the guys, to see if he could bail them out of jail. And it turns out that these guys were in the country on expired visas and I guess the police showed up at their house to check on them, and that the guy had a gun when he answered the door? I don’t know. And you’re not supposed to carry a gun if you’re in the country on a visa? So he was arrested and then deported. And it was like, “Alright, I guess we’re not gonna make the movie then.”
It was really easy to get meetings all over town because people wanted to meet Fabio, and then really hard to get them to actually pony up the dough to make the thing. But you know, there’s been a lot of those stories. A lot of different shows that almost go and then there’s some crazy reason why it doesn’t.
MB: Well, thank you.
S.K : Yeah, sure.
MB: This has been great.
A huge thanks goes out to Seth Kearsley himself for agreeing to do this interview, and of course, all the hard work that he and everyone else put into making Mummies Alive!
Comments
Post a Comment