A Little About The Process Of Designing The Images For The Yo Gabba Gabba Show

Evan Dorkin explains here some of the stages in the creation of his part in the characters in the first season of the Nick Jr show.

We’re developing the animation and characters and backgrounds for the “Super Martian Robot Girl” segments, which were originally a series of live-action shorts, based on the “Spider-Man” segments from the Electric Company, if you’re old enough to remember that—or old enough to rent it now. Easy Reader would be reading a Spider-Man comic, and then they’d push in on the comic and show what’s in it, with a live-action segment. For Yo Gabba Gabba, they were doing that. We designed the Super Martian Robot Girl costume and the comic book that she’s in. They wanted it to look like one of those $1.50 Marvel Treasury books from the 70s, which was pretty cool. The segment was killed by Nickelodeon—they didn’t like the live-action. It was going to be talking animals and monsters, with some cartoonishly dressed people who would then call the superhero character to come and save them. The show was for preschoolers, and I think they thought the segment was a little off-putting and creepy. Some of it looked a little like homemade 70s theater—cardboard sets, purposefully looking very theatrical. It didn’t work, but they wanted to save the segment, so they did it in Flash animation and asked us to adapt it. They had audio tracks for eight or nine segments. Long story short, we ended up doing a pilot segment, and Nickelodeon liked it and wanted more, which consisted of redesigning all off the characters, from all of the material that was shot, redesigning all of the background, and then doing a bunch of limited animation poses. It was the first time I worked with Flash animation, so it was really interesting. People seemed to enjoy it, and we had always liked the show, because we knew one of the co-creators, and he sent us the YouTube pilot from wayback, and it looked like something [Dorkin’s daughter] Emily would like to look at. She doesn’t really care for anything else I do. She watched the characters get designed—she doesn’t know anything about production, so she thought the characters would show up, like 20 minutes later. Overall, it’s been a really nice experience. And the check cleared.

I found the process fascinating so I thought you might enjoy it too.