I almost conceived of it as a movie, thinking, “All right, it’s about a three-hour-and-20-minute movie. Working on Kid Cosmic, I had to come up with the story first - to think of the whole thing at once. When you’re making an 11-minute or 22-minute series of an episodic show, you go in every week to the story meeting asking, “What are we doing today?” Then you just kind of make up an idea on the spot. What’s the main difference between writing episodic and serial episodes, whether they’re 11’s or 22’s? I just put it in the drawer, hoping that someday networks would be open to doing serialized comedy. At that point, I couldn’t even have begun to work on it. You want to watch him get better, to show growth. I couldn’t just keep having Kid not be good at his powers - a viewer would get really frustrated with that. I just came up with an idea and realized I couldn’t make 11’s out of it. It wasn’t like I consciously came up with a serial show. What made you want to do a serial show all the way back then? In 2009, Avatar: The Last Airbender had just ended the year prior, and there really wasn’t anything else in children’s TV like it. It was just being at the right place at the right time with the right project. By the next Wednesday, the show was green-lit. They said it was exactly what they were looking for - that they wanted serialized 22-minute shows for kids and families. We were able to ultimately produce an animatic for a 22-minute episode, and when I got word that Netflix was looking for shows, I went over to the studio on a Thursday and played it for them. I dusted off the idea, and I showed it to my friend Frank Angones and my wife, Lauren Faust, and we started kicking around the idea. So I put it on the back burner until 2015, when the industry climate was changing and more networks were open to the idea of serialization within kids’ animated series. But the more I started walking through the idea, I realized I couldn’t just make random 11- or 22-minute episodes - the character needed to learn and grow and change. I came up with the initial concept and characters for Kid Cosmic in 2009. Vulture spoke with McCracken about influences, why this series needed to be serial, and why he didn’t want to just make “another campy parody of superheroes.” The problem? He has no idea what he’s doing - and every alien in outer space has its eyes on his prize. Soon, he’s brought together a ragtag team of locals and turned them into accidental superheroes. The series follows a kid, living alone in a desert town and dreaming of being a hero, who happens upon some special stones from outer space. Kid Cosmic, which Netflix released today, is McCracken’s first series to go straight to streaming, and with it, he returns to tales of childhood superheroics, but with a twist. But after working on episodic animation for the better part of three decades, the creator of Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends and Wander Over Yonder was ready to go serial. A veteran of Hanna-Barbera’s What a Cartoon, McCracken was instrumental, as art director, in the success of Genndy Tartakovsky’s Dexter’s Laboratory, and his own influential blockbuster hit from Cartoon Network’s 1990s slate of high-octane series, The Powerpuff Girls, got the reboot treatment last year. Craig McCracken’s visual style is a staple of American animated television.
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