One would think that Archer: Vice, the fifth season of the hit FX show about an alcoholic womanizer with severe mommy issues, cornered the market on the ’80s throwback category of adult cartoon shows. Not so fast, says Moonbeam City creator and executive producer Scott Gairdner. For, as his new show’s trailer explains, we have yet to visit its titular city, a place that is “soaked in neon, drenched in murder, coated in a hot, thick layer of sex — oh, and some really excellent restaurants!” Centered around a detective named Dazzle Novak, it’s like an animated version of Miami Vice meets, as Gairdner puts it, “the stupid version of Drive.”
Gairdner, who cut his teeth interning for Robot Chicken and Moral Orel, has created his own viral web series and written for Conan on TBS. The comedy writer and producer took the time to chat with Uproxx ahead of Moonbeam City‘s premiere on Wednesday, September 16 at 10:30 p.m. EST on Comedy Central. Among other things, we discussed where the idea for the show came from, how he got his start, and star Rob Lowe’s penchant for producing highly satisfying and repetitive “sex sounds.”
My roommate walked into the apartment while I was watching Moonbeam City‘s first sex scene. He made a comment about not judging me, especially when he noticed it was a cartoon.
Did he think you were watching some weird hentai thing?
Maybe, though he didn’t appreciate my joke about tentacles.
I bet he asked whether or not that was Rob Lowe’s voice in the background. Did he think it was an animated version of the Rob Lowe sex tape?
[Laughs]
Not every episode has a sex scene, but some definitely have more than one. Those are always really fun to do because Rob really revels in giving us the sex sounds we need. We even came up with a signature sex sound for him, which is “oh-kay.” It’s very staccato. Even though we probably recorded enough the first time, we make him do it every time. There’s a lot of range to the “oh-kay.” Some are more forceful and get the job done, whereas others are sensual since he’s in love.
This is Rob Lowe’s “I am Groot.”
Absolutely! Or going back a little further, it’s like the word “smurf” to the Smurfs. It can mean a thousand things.
When did the idea for Moonbeam City first come about?
Back in 2011 is when the idea really hit, when the movie Drive came out with Ryan Gosling. I thought it was so aesthetically striking. It was an ’80s throwback — dark, moody and synthy — but also very futuristic. Especially during the scene when he’s driving through the dry L.A. river and he’s got this intense glare. The song “A Real Hero” is playing, and it’s a moving moment because of how it’s lit and how the music is. But you’re also like, “Why are we thinking about this guy as a hero? What has he actually done? I don’t know that this character has earned this moment.” So I started thinking about a guy who has this angsty stare that seems very deep, moody and brooding, but behind that stare is nothing. He’s just a dim, stupid guy who is very selfish. That’s Dazzle Novak. It’s the stupid version of Drive.
Also, my whole life I’ve been seeing this artwork from the ’80s that’s still up in nail salons and laundry mat windows. These pale-eyed, angular people who are glamorous. So I thought, “How has this not been the style of a show yet?” It just implies this whole world of angular, neon ’80s excess. That was the swirl that it came from, but it actually took a while to figure out what the actual story was. Initially, it was about models and photographers, which made more sense to me. Comedy Central told us they liked it, but asked if we could make it “more for dudes.” Richard Schwartz, our executive producer, said: “How about we give them guns? That’s for dudes. Just make them cops. Lots of violence.” So we came back to Comedy Central that week and they said yes.
Even so, the show retains its focus on your original ideas. Like the pilot episode’s mall singer plot, or the bad guys being dressed as Prince from the Purple Rain album cover. All of it ’80s, guns or not.
Yeah, we’re very fetish-y with our ’80s references. We jam a lot in there. Plus, Dazzle in a way is based on Prince a little bit. Just this smoldering, incredibly charismatic guy who is kind of a selfish jerk. But the mix makes a lot of sense to me, and Richard really helped make it work. Pizzaz is still this hyper-glamorous, Demi Moore-type woman. It makes sense that everybody is super attractive and vain, and they focus on things that are not their police work. That’s sort of what the pilot was meant to prove.
You’ve said that you wrote Novak’s character with Lowe in mind.
I didn’t know exactly what we were aiming for. It was very different writing the pilot than writing the other episodes, because we didn’t know whose voices we were writing for. We were just trying to create vague characters in our heads. So when it was done, and Comedy Central told us to record and animate it, Lowe was a pie in the sky dream. He straddles the line between comedy and drama so well, and he’s such an ’80s icon, so he was a dream get. We thought, “That’d be a fun ‘no’ to get.” Then he said yes right away.
Not only is animation generally easy and not a huge time commitment, but we try to make it super fun for all of these actors. A fun little break from their real jobs. Banks is a major film director now, so we want the recording to be this fun diversion for her and everybody else. We keep it loose and we improvise. We’re very lucky to have the level of talent that we have.
Did the rest of the cast fill out once Lowe signed on?
We thought that if we could get him as Dazzle, he’d be a great centerpiece. So yeah, Lowe signed on first, and he’s a producer on the show, as well. He’s super dreamy, as well. Every single person who is in the room with him falls in love right away, men especially.
Animation often appeals to voice actors because of how easily the job can fit with their schedules. Did you ever try to have everyone together for a recording session, or was it generally separate?
Because of everybody’s crazy schedules, we had to do it piecemeal. People were often recording from offsite. Banks and Kate Mara were both making movies in Baton Rouge during the first half of our recording sessions. Other people called in from all over. Kevin McDonald called in from Winnipeg. Trace Adkins, the big country singer, called in from Nashville.
Trace Adkins is in this?
Trace Adkins plays Sizzle Conrad, who is a firefighter nemesis of Dazzle. That was one of the most fun recordings ever because, even with satellite hookups and Skype, you can have a level of recording quality in which it feels like the person is in the room with you. However, his hookup was really awful — just deep, deep static. Then he started recording, and his voice was so booming and masculine that it cut through the static. He just tore through it. It was unbelievable. A voice so strong it can tear through sonic walls.
The first trailer is rife with neon and awful lighting, especially whenever Pizzaz Miller (Elizabeth Banks) chastises Dazzle Novak (Rob Lowe). Her face is always lit by window blinds.
That’s one of my favorite jokes in the pilot. I think we only had one initially, then we got up to two, then three. Now it’s a common thing in the script, for whenever we need to show that Pizzaz is full of rage. In a later episode, we meet all of Pizzaz’s sisters who all have different types of shade. Some are horizontal, whereas others are clovers and moons. I never really watched the show Silk Stockings, but if you do a Google Image search or watch two minutes of it, you’ll see a lot of bad, hokey lighting like that.
Everything is soaked in neon in this show. It’s such a tedious level of detail — we have to review every prop, costume and setting. I just thought that, if we were playing in this world filled with neon, grids, teal, pink and purple, it would make it so fun because everything could have a little flair to it. In later episodes, nothing is just a thing. Every trashcan, every little thing has some flair to it.
I remember a trashcan used by Novak in the pilot’s final fight that features the popular early ’90s “Jazz” design.
Yeah, it was a distinctive “swoosh” design that was on disposable cups in the late ’80s and early ’90s. That was so much of the fun of doing this. There’s been a lot of ’80s things, and we wanted to be specific and different. To come at it from a very loving place, instead of somewhere negative. I get bothered by that stuff. Why not swim in a palate that you like? I was losing my mind in every meeting where we were reviewing designs. I thought, “This is what I want the world to be. This is where I want to live!”
What was it like interning for Robot Chicken and Moral Orel?
I interned with an animation studio called ShadowMachine, where I mainly worked on Moral Orel. That came about because I was a gigantic Mr. Show fan. There’s a message board called A Special Thing, which was the earliest hub of comedy nerdom, and I found out that one of Mr. Show‘s writers, Dino Stamatopoulos had been posting there. So I messaged him out of the blue and offered to intern for him, and he was nice enough to have me. It was a weird place to intern because it’s a stop-motion studio, which is the most precarious work ever. I remember trying to assist in the model shop and getting everything wrong, but it was cool to spend time with Dino. Just like it was a dream for me to get to work for Conan [O’Brien], because I’m a mega fan of everybody who worked there — from Dino, to Louis C.K. and Tommy Blacha, who’s Moonbeam City‘s showrunner. He’s a great early Conan writer, and he also did TV Funhouse and Metalocalypse. My specific area of comedy nerdom is early Conan writers, and it’s been cool to hang around a lot of them.
Were you originally trying to do comedy or animation?
I definitely saw myself as more of a live-action sketch guy, and that’s a lot of what I did for a long time. In college, I got into motion graphics. I found early on that was a way to set my sketches apart from other people, because when you’re making sketches on YouTube for free, there’s no budget or resources, but what you do have is time and effort. So my production value came out of that. I came to really like editing and graphics, and the control you can have. I also realized I could use this to do rudimentary animation. I started messing around with a series called Tiny Fuppets, a purposefully cheap knock-off of Muppet Babies made in Portugal (actually made by me), and it caught on. My manager said that I could use Tiny Fuppets as a calling card to launch a different animated property, something that Disney couldn’t sue me for. So I combined my interest in animation with my love for the ’80s and the retro futurist aesthetic. I thought if I could marry that vibe with stupid comedy, it would be a fun mix.
“Moonbeam City” premieres Wednesday, September 16, at 10:30 p.m. EST on Comedy Central. Here’s a preview…
