Humor Blog Highlights

A Deep Fried Interview with Rob DeBorde

One of the creators of Deep Fried, Live! starring Tako the Octopus, quite possibly the most popular animated show on the Internet, Rob DeBorde has played roles in every aspect of producing the hit – a feat never even considered before the days of the Internet. Still striving to see his creation take the next step towards television stardom, he strongly believes that simplicity continues to be the key to success in this business, as proven time and time again by the original greats which continue to live on in our hearts…and through syndication!

Just Laugh’s Managing Editor, Matthew Gatesy, recently took a little time to talk with Rob about the production of Tako’s show and his take on the future of animation on the ‘net. Here’s what went down…

First of all, where did the concept for Deep Fried, Live! come from?

Let’s see… Originally it started with the character – Tako. I had created Tako probably three years ago as part of a comic strip that had a whole bunch of oddball characters. Tako was this octopus that lived in a bucket and he was at kind of a pet store full of weird characters, and he was the best thing about the strip. My partner, Dave O’Neal, really liked the character and when he quit working at Electronic Arts, he said, “Well, we should do something together with that octopus character of yours.” I said alright – let’s do an animated show, and he at the time had gotten really into cooking, as I was – he was a little bit ahead of me – and he said, “…with all this cooking stuff, let’s make a cooking show and have him being the main character.” And so Deep Fried, Live! was born out of the concept of putting an octopus in a kitchen. It made a lot of sense, obviously having a guy with a lot of arms to not only do the work, but also to get a few of them cut off once in a while!

So I just took it from there, watching Emeril day and night to see all the things we could make fun of, and that’s where Deep Fried, Live! basically came from. The show itself, in terms of the content, after we got more serious about the cooking, is a lot more like Good Eats – it’s a show on the Food Network geared more towards teaching you how to cook or teaching you the elements of food science, that kind of stuff, and so in terms of the show, we patterned it more after that. Of course, there’s not an octopus hosting that show, so it’s a little different…

Who comes up with the recipes that you use?

The recipes are a combination of Dave O’Neal and I, and it’s mostly then experimentation. A lot of recipe writing is taking what somebody else has done and changing a few things about it to make it your own. There aren’t really any hard and fast rules about borrowing because everybody does it, but after we really got into it more, most of it really just comes out of the kitchen. Dave and I both have different styles of cooking – he’s a lot more into the slow cooking, spend lots of time experimenting and tweaking, while I want it done fast, and as raw as possible and as clean as possible. So I tend to grill a lot more and do more fast searing and cook more fish and meat, and Dave does a lot more soups and stews and things that take some more time.

So you actually create everything that’s in the shows beforehand?

Yeah, everything that’s in the shows, in terms of both the recipes and content – the music, the animation, all of that. To be honest, playing in the kitchen is the most fun of all of it because it’s like, Let’s see what the best way to cook a piece of Ahi is, and then we get ten pieces of fish, cut them into little bites and try cooking them in different ways.

What goes into the making of an episode?

Quite a bit! It starts with the script – I have a show bible that has as many ideas that I have come up with, and I think there’s probably about three dozen or so. We draw from those – I write the first pass at the script and then it gets kicked around between Dave and I, and we usually get some other people together to work on it. Once we finalize the script, it gets recorded – the dialog gets recorded. We have now two setups – I have an audio setup in my office so that I can record stuff and the main studio is Dave’s. He comes from an audio background, so he’s got quite a nice setup. We’ll record all of the dialog, and while that’s going on, I’ll be doing character design and creating any new sets that have to be done. At this point, we’ve got a lot of stuff already done, so it’s mostly just integrating the characters. I do all of that work starting in a notebook, just sketching pictures of the characters, and then creating them online in Illustrator and then bringing them intoFlash. I usually end up doing storyboards for, if not the whole episode, the main parts that aren’t as obvious. At this point, we’ve got kind of a short-hand with the animation – whoever’s doing it, so they know what to expect based on the script.

The animation process is definitely what takes the longest – that’s the part that tends to slow us down the most because it takes a big time commitment. At the level at which we’re doing it – we’re doing it at 18 fps (frames per second) – and we try to do it as high quality as we can, so we’re pretty slow at that end! It’ll be anywhere, for a ten minute episode, six weeks to two months of just straight animation. If we get some more people in the office, that time will cut down, but once we’ve got the show flowing, usually in the past it started with Dave doing most of the animation while I’m cleaning up more storyboards and characters, and then I’ll come onboard towards the end and do more, but lately I’ve been doing more animation.

Once we get close to the end, all the little music and sound effects cues start coming in and we’ll start incorporating all of the food elements – the sidebar stuff, the recipes, the technical things, working on some of the extras that get packed on. Usually by towards the end, we’ll announce that it’s coming out and then when everybody’s expecting it, we’ve given ourselves a deadline and the last week or two is testing and making sure that everything works right…and looking for as many typos as we can find! There’s always a few that slip through – we still get one every once in a while, somebody will find something in the first episode buried in there and love to point it out!

How many man-hours do you think your whole crew puts into one episode?

Oh boy… That’s tough because different episodes have taken longer – I think the third episode took the most time overall because that episode had a lot of music and animation. Gee whiz, I’ve never even sat down to think about that because there was probably about a three month process from when we started the script to when we actually published it, and somebody was always working full-time on that episode, I think we had actually four people working on it, production-wise, mostly being myself and Dave and another guy…I really don’t know. I mean, you can figure in that time of three months, for the most part, two guys working full-time or close to it and two more guys working part-time, so whatever that works out to, that’s probably what it is.

[Editor’s Note: nearly fifteen hundred hours, if our calculator works right!]

Who does the voice for Tako?

I do the voice…I do most of the voices on the show. Tako actually gets pitch-shifted up so that his voice sounds a little higher than mine – obviously I don’t sound like Tako when I’m speaking! There’s obviously some acting – of the all of us, I’m the one who has a little bit in the way of acting skills, so I get to do the voices and it’s kinda cool, you know? You do the voice and then you act it out, and then you throw it through the processor and all of a sudden, hey – it’s Tako! It sounds like that stupid octopus…

Do you have a favorite episode?

Yeah, there are two we haven’t done yet that are my favorite, in terms of the scripts and the stories – they’re the funniest. I went back and read them recently and its like, “Wow, those are gonna be great – let’s get ‘em done!”But of the ones that are out there, I probably think that the third one is the best, but the second one maybe has just a better basic story – the king prawn episode. But in terms of what we’re trying to produce, the chocolate chip episode probably has overall the best of everything put together.

You mentioned a couple others that you haven’t made yet – what can we expect from the next episode and when can we expect that?

Well, what I’m working on right now is a shorter episode that I’m hoping to get done by Halloween, which I think is doable. That’s always been our biggest crutch – just being able to complete these things. We start out with the idea that this one’s going to be shorter and we’ll get it done quicker, but they always end up being ten minutes anyways! The one I’m working on now will hopefully be done by then – it’ll be about a three minute episode, and then we’ve got two more lined up that are in production – they’ve been scripted and are in storyboard stage. One is about salmon, where Tako actually goes to Alaska to spend some time trying to figure out why salmon spawn, how they do it and how they get where they’re going, and during that process, of course, he teaches you how to cook salmon. The other episode is a steak episode, as we’ve had a number of people request that, and in this one Tako gets abducted by aliens and ends up having to show this alien theproper way to cook a cow because they’re having trouble with the calculations…it’s just really funny – I was pleased with the script on that one.

What are some of your other favorite Flash animations?

We started paying attention to it back when Camp Chaos was hot, so the old classics – Napster Bad and such were just great for their time. One of my favorites that they did was the George Lucas one right after they announced the Attack of the Clones – I can’t remember what he called it, but there was an episode that he did which had George Lucas kind of doing the Ed Wood-thing, and that was really great! I really like some of Joe Cartoon’s stuff – the frog in the blender and all of that stuff’s great.

There’s something that I saw recently that I thought was pretty clever – I think it was a cartoon that actually showed up on television, but I’m pretty sure that it was done in Flash. I think it’s a chicken and a fish…maybe a rooster and a fish – it was on the Cartoon Network and it was this rooster in this park with this fish that thought he was just wonderful, and it was really, really well done animation-wise, but if you watched it and you knew what you were looking at, it was Flash – you could just tell that it was done that way, but it showed the potential of taking Flash to the next level and doing 24 fps, or in this case it was probably 28 or 29 fps or whatever the standard is…

Other stuff online? A lot of times I’m too critical, so I’ll tend to look at them first for story, and if that doesn’t engage me, then I’ll look at the animation. I mean, just for pure animation, that silly old stick-figure kung-fu thing that was popping around for so long was a lot of fun, and it was really sharply animated for as simple as it was – whoever did that knew what they were doing and that’s the one thing that’s tough with a lot of the Flash animation out there. You’ve got people that aren’t really looking at traditional animation in terms of how they do their stuff and so they just do it the way the Flash instructions tell them how, which isn’t always the best way to do it. You need to actually look at cartoons and look at how things move…or at least good cartoons – old Warner Brothers ones or something like that.

What other websites do you frequent?

I tend to actually bounce around with just a lot of media sites. With my entertainment dollar, I don’t have enough time to play around online, so if I was going to go looking at stuff…I mean, I frequent the sites that we’re syndicated on, just to kinda see what they’re popping up – Camp Chaos, and it’s always fun to play around at New Grounds, and of course your own site. Heavy.com is a great site – I’m sure a lot of people are familiar with that, just for the visuals and the design – they do a lot of great stuff.

What do you guys do in your spare time?

Besides time that’s spent in the kitchen, I go out to eat a lot – that’s actually the best thing! It’s from both a professional stand-point and an entertainment stand-point. I like hiking a lot. Living in the Bay area, we’ve got a lot of trails and stuff, so I do a lot of that. My wife and I like to spend some time at the beach, just get outside and do outdoors kinds of stuff.Dave is, of course, a musician, and so he plays along with that, although he’s recently just had twins, so he spends a lot of time with that these days – being the stay-at-home Dad.

Since you go out to eat a lot and live in California, is the In and Out Burger really as good as people say it is?

You may laugh, but I had In and Out for lunch! It’s a funny thing – yeah, it is good. If you’ve never had one, it’s kind of an experience. The first time you may go, “Yeah, that wasn’t too bad, but I don’t see the big deal…” and by about the fifth time you go back it’s, “Oh boy, I’ve got to get another one of these!” They just do what they do and that’s all that it is. They don’t play around with a bunch of other items – you’re not going to find a chicken sandwich or a triple burger with bacon and some kind of fancy cheese – they do a hamburger, a double burger and a cheeseburger, and that’s it. Everything’s fresh and they don’t try to play around, and that’s why it’s good…it is really good!

What CDs are currently in your CD player?

Right now the soundtrack to The Empire Strikes Back is sitting in there. I listen to a lot of scores, movie scores and then some just orchestral stuff, and if it’s not that then it’s Weezer, the last Korn album, System of a Down,Tenacious D. Everclear is another one that I’ve been listening to a lot lately.

If you were stuck on a deserted island, what five things would you want to take with you?

Well, let’s see…

I’ve obviously gotta have something to cook with…I’m trying to think if I really would need anything…probably I’d just need a cast-iron pan. Then you just build a fire and you could do just about anything with that and it’s so durable that it’s not going to get messed up. I’ve got to have some kind of music, otherwise I’d go nuts, but then again I’d assume you’d have to include some kind of thing to play it on as another element, so maybe I’ll just take my guitar with me so that I can just make my own music.

I suppose that a boat to get off the island would be nice, but if we’re not playing that kind of a game then that’s probably against the rules! I would probably then just take the last Harry Potter book to read over and over again – I really enjoyed those books – and if not that, then a Stephen King book of some sort…kind of at odds, but both really good. I might take my dog. I’ve got a pug and she’s just a blast to be around. I guess I don’t need that much – maybe a blanket if it gets too cold…

Who would win in a fight between a Tyrannosaurus Rex and the Queen of England?

I think the T-Rex would win – I think he’d chomp her little head right off!

Is Tako throwing a huge Halloween party this year and if so, why weren’t we invited?

You know, the funny thing is I did want to throw a Halloween party this year and Tako would, of course, be the host…and my wife said no! She said,“You’re not bringing all those people to our tiny, little house!” so I guess we’re going someplace else, but the episode that we’re working on, he does have a little party going on and I guess the guest list was just a little too exclusive – he’s keeping it cut down to just the important people, like Emeril!

Is there anything else that you’d like to add?

The animation is the only other thing I’d like to promote because Flash is such a good tool for being creative and it’s given a lot of people the chance to get into animation that never would have otherwise, and I wish that Macromedia saw that – I don’t think that they’re aware of how big of an impact they’ve had on the field and here’s the chance for the United States to take over a lot of the production that’s been lost overseas. Flash is a really powerful tool and if they would just step up to the plate, they’d get it back.

And tell everybody to watch old cartoons!

Just Laugh magazine would like to thank Rob for taking the time to give us a fresh look into the animated world of today (and tomorrow)! We certainly appreciate the insight and hope that someday the next generation of animators will take from this advice and continue the traditions of laughter that have been carried on by Tako, Bart Simpson, Mickey Mouse and countless others.

For even more supplements to the show, including a weekly comic strip and columns written by Tako himself, take a click on over to his own website at 8-Legged Entertainment…

8-Legged Entertainment

About Matthew Gatesy (8 Posts from 2001 - 2002)
The Co-Founder and Former Managing Editor of Just Laugh, Matt helped to build its foundation as a place to feature the funniest content from around the web, working with Scott to run Just Laugh magazine for over three years.