So, who is Dr. Tran?
Well, we started off doing short animated films - Beyond Grandpa I & II that played with Spike and Mike, which are a whole bunch of silly, basically old people jokes. Not mean spirited, just absurd. I feel I can do old people jokes because someday, if I’m lucky, I’m going to be an old grandpa and it will all come back to haunt me. So, I accept responsibility for that. Dr. Tran is our third film.
How long has it been between Beyond Grandpa & Dr. Tran?
Beyond Grandpa I and II – 1999 is when we finished Part II, so then about four years. I went to work at Nickelodeon for a year in New York and did a pilot at MTV – Deadtime Stories – an animated horror pilot with Michael Dougherty who is actually now the big shot writer of X2 and the upcoming Superman movie, and he had created this animated horror show that MTV wanted to do at the time. I came up with a script with him and we created this little thing that didn’t make it to air. But it was a good experience.
And then I moved to LA and I’ve been working in comic books and doing little animated things here and there, and Dr. Tran is kind of our return to irreverent short animated films. We just thought, hey, we’ve got a month to kill so let’s have some fun again and my friend Jason Johnson, who co-created it and voiced Dr. Tran, he came down. He lives in Santa Cruz and is actually a massage therapist who, this is kinda funny….he’s a massage therapist who recently came down with Poison Oak. He doesn’t find it funny, but I think it’s funny. So, he’s been broke. He came down and stayed with me for a few months and we were going to do Beyond Grandpa III – we thought that was the natural thing.
So we were just hanging out one night and came up with this character called Dr. Tran, who is a little boy who was named Doctor because his parents wanted him to become a doctor so bad. He started off as a character for an unrealized Beyond Grandpa comic book – the little kid in the neighborhood who the Grandpa would antagonize. Say some kid falls down and he says “Ow, ow, I need a Band-Aid” or something. And the Grandpa would say “Why don’t you get Dr. Tran? After all, he’s a Doctor” and Tran would say “I’m not a doctor!” and that would be his little catch phrase.
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And so we’re sitting there talking about it and saying “yea, yea, that’s pretty good.” I’m doing the Grandpa thing and he’s doing the Dr. Tran voice and we’re going back and forth and back and forth and I suddenly realize this could make a whole film. We can just antagonize the little boy for an entire film and somehow that led into doing a mock movie trailer. Basically Hollywood sells you every good film and bad film the same way – like it’s the best thing you’re ever going to see. They’re packaging every turd the same as their diamonds. So, we thought, well if they’ll sell anything to you that way, why not sell a little kid? Let’s point out the absurdity by having them sell a little kid that way and somehow the two ideas just came together.
So, how did the idea of a trailer appeal to you? You figured you had a concept for maybe what would seem like almost an animated full length show but why all of a sudden, you know what, out of all the possibilities, a trailer sounds really good?
Well, part of it, well, a huge factor– and this is probably going to be somewhat disappointing to people to find out–is time and budget, neither of which we had much of. So it was a matter of finding that perfect concept where we have a very stationary main figure. Our old shorts were grandpas and grandpas don’t move too much, and that’s a benefit for someone who has very little time and money (laughs). So, we came up with something with this little guy who is pretty much idle. He waves his arms around, I make a set of unexcitable normal mouths and a set of screaming mouths packed full of teeth (so that as he gets angrier, his mouth gets bigger and bigger), one background and a few posters. And then I hired a friend of mine to animate the graphics and the little figure in After Effects. Dr. Tran was a lot like a little puppet, drawn by hand and put together in PhotoShop.
How did you come up with the concept of the little Polynesian boy? Is he Polynesian or Asian because I know when I’ve seen it, it looks like Hawaii a little bit?
We never really chose. People have told us that he’s Vietnamese. We never decided that. Basically the idea was, let’s get him as far away from the American culture of entertainment as we could possibly get him. Like he is just unaffected by it. He doesn’t know what to expect and it doesn’t concern him and he’s not even interested. He’s got chores to do. He wants to finish his breakfast – very simple – and then take the cultures and juxtapose them. The original idea was contrast.
How long did it take to make it? To get it done?
I don’t think I actually answered your question. I think the idea of doing a movie trailer instead of a whole piece was just something that I always wanted to do, when we use to make short films on video throughout high school. I just kept saying, let’s try to do a movie trailer, it looks fun, but I didn’t have access to the editing software. We didn’t even have digital video in the Stone Age (the early Nineties) so, yes, it was just something I’ve always wanted to do.
But it took about five weeks. We had an early concept, but from when we started writing the script to Comic-Con was just over five weeks. It was a real rush. That’s why we had to hire an animator, editor, sound guy, and we had a producer who funded it, did our digital effects in the live action scene… Rick Cortes is our awesome, awesome producer who provided us with our little kid who gets punched in the live action sequence and a lot of the resources that we had. He’s a digital effects artist whose been doing movies and stuff in the industry for years. So he did that marquee where you see Dr. Tran on the live action theatre.
Who is the Actual Asian Male [part of the live action testimonials that spoof on obnoxious audience reactions in television trailers]?
Actually he’s my friend Paul C-H-I-E-N (I’m thinking ahead because I know I spell names wrong and they always get pissed at me). So, Paul is one of the guys we did films with back in high school. I’ve known him since freshman year in high school and he’s gone on to do things of his own. He ran an Americorp group for a couple of years. I think he’s in school now and I just called him up and said “Hey, do you want to come up to LA and be in this thing.” He was glad to. We got to employ a lot of our old friends. We try to get everybody in.
Now I know, and it’s not so much a departure from Dr. Tran, but you have your own or at least you supply support for a comic book that’s now overseen by my own editor, Chris Ryall. Can you explain a little bit about your involvet in both comics and also animation? How did the two converge?
When I did the Beyond Grandpa shorts, it led to a desk job at Nickelodeon for a year, computer animating for Little Bill, Bill Cosby’s Nick Jr. show. Once we finished up our MTV pilot, I moved to Los Angeles and I got a call from my friend Serena Valentino, the creator of a comic book called GLOOMCOOKIE. I think she was just out of artists that day, and I had just moved to LA and I was like, I’m here, I’m going to get into the animation industry and I’m going to…..HELLO?....Sure, I’ll do a comic book and then it was BOOM. I’m inside my house every day for like two years just doing a comic book. I didn’t really need to be in LA but it was great fun.
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So, after GLOOMCOOKIE, I illustrated a three issue horror mini-series called ALEISTER ARCANE for IDW Publishing, written by Steve Niles, which is now finished up and in development at Paramount Pictures. Somehow I squeezed making Dr. Tran in there somewhere. I think that’s how the timeline goes – so I just did it between things – which is the reason we had to go so fast because I had to go right on to the next comic book. We’ve gotten such good response to Dr. Tran. We did the DVD this year.
It was kind of a rush to get it done by Comicon. I was reading your journal log and it said I’m in a rush to get this done. I don’t know if I’m going to get it done – literally weeks were you able to get the artwork, the bonus features added, you said there were some glitches here and there that you had to work out.
And it’s been the same way with everything that we do. I don’t know how it works but by the end of it, everything is fine. And it seems to be like by the final day we’re done and it’s beautiful and it worked and everybody is happy. But every single day up to that point has been a screeching struggle of mountain climb. I don’t know why. Do you know what I think? With Beyond Grandpa I had to do almost everything myself. I wrote it with my buddies and I would animate, draw, edit and do many of the voices myself, and when you do it that way you have full control. Whereas, when you are relying on a lot of people, everybody may be talented and good at what they do, but coordinating the production becomes the new priority. Things kind of scatter and everyone is trying to figure out what you’re thinking. I’m really impressed with people who direct animation because that kind of coordination is a real skill.
Other responses to the DVD or at least downstairs at the Con?
We just started selling them but it’s going great. People are mostly saying they saw it last year here at the Con and they were waiting for it and they’ve been checking the website every now and again and that kind of stuff.
That’s how I found out about it. I saw Spike & Mike this year and as soon as I saw it, literally the next day, I was on websites on how I could get my hands on it, and I’m not being facetious, I thought it was the best short of this year that I’ve seen. It was enough to prompt me to go find out a little more about this and, sure enough, I saw the site – the site looks great but the short wasn’t available to buy until the Con.
And Spike has been – he’s been trying to get the DVD rights from us too for quite a while but we thought it would be cool to just do a limited thing. We did 400 of them, and there’s a lot of people who couldn’t come to the Con and they are emailing me saying hey, are we going to be able to get this later and I’m not positive that they will. I’m hoping we will have some left over for them. If we don’t, we did just sign a deal with Spike so he’s going to put out a DVD probably within the next few months that will have it on there. I’m considering giving him the documentary on the Making of Dr. Tran. Just because how absurd is it that there be a documentary that we made for sale in Virgin Megastore? So the fact that we only did 400 is kinda like, it dies there.
So, what’s next? What’s on the horizon? Do you have any concepts or things you’re thinking about since you’ve got a really good response from Dr. Tran?
Yeah, we thought a lot about sequel ideas for Tran, expanding the character, not necessarily the concepts. And there’s been some interest in Beyond Grandpa from different people – there’s always something on hold or in development somewhere. Adam Sandler started an animation website back when the whole animation website thing was really popular. Shnorff.com, I think it was called. He wanted to do Beyond Grandpa, so we were getting all geared up to do that and we thought it was great and Shnorff shut it’s doors before it even got off the ground, because of the whole dot com crash or whatever you call it.
And then we pitched another idea. We have this kids animated adventure show we pitched to a studio and this guy loved it, and the next week he lost his job. And then this guy at another studio loved Beyond Grandpa and it was like, “guys we’re going to take you out to dinner, it’s going to be great, we’re going to put this on the air.” I think it was about a month later, he lost his job.
It seems like you’re a bad totem.
A trend! So, I’ve learned to just take it as it comes. I don’t expect anything from the entertainment industry and we just make stuff when the inspiration hits us, and when we have time. You know we thought about Dr. Tran sequels but so far I don’t want to do that. It just kind of stands on its own pretty well and I don’t want to screw it up in a re-tread. Do you know what I mean? Unless we had just the right idea.
I know Craig McCracken with No Neck Joe he’s gone on – you know – to kid friendly stuff. Obviously some of the things in Spike and Mike are a bit risqué but it translates well for other people who are looking to get their start or at least get something really big off the ground. Are you actively looking for someone to put you on the payroll to do a concept in your own mind about what you’d like to maybe do?
There is a production company that I’m actually working with that has a show idea. It’s more their thing than it is mine so I don’t want to say too much about it but they had me come in and design the characters, rewrite the pitch, kinda conform the characters to my sensibilities, things like that – I’m not sure where that is right now. I have a manager that tends to keep track of that stuff for me, so I don’t know. I don’t have too much interest in the business side of it actually. It’s just a wonderful process of working with talented people. And like I said, Dr. Tran – many of my buddies – cause I’ve got some funny friends – Jason Johnson and Justin Hunt who both were in Beyond Grandpa, are two of the funniest guys you’ll ever meet and I just happened to go to high school with them. So, I’m just lucking out basically. With comic books I have a little trouble with the isolation. You get to the point where you go stir crazy and get up and go the bed and between that time you are endlessly working on comic books. That’s all you’re doing. There’s nobody around. Occasionally someone walks their dog by and I say “Please keep me company”. So I don’t know where I was going with that so…..
Animation and comics. Obviously with animation you get to be involved with a lot of other people and no isolation with getting other people involved. Doing comic books is very interesting. Do you find one is more artistic than the other? Do you derive more satisfaction than the other?
They are both challenging – in ways – unique. So, I don’t know. I want to write screen plays and do the whole thing. I just like playing with media and seeing what happens. When we made Dr. Tran, we had no clue that people were going to like it. You never know. You work in a vacuum. You don’t know if people will be OK with what you did. We thought, oh god, this kid’s four or five… he uses all this language and we thought this 3D sequence that only goes for a few seconds, are people going to be pissed at us? We (the audience) have been sitting here waiting for this 3D sequence and now we have to take our glasses off – is the crowd going to lynch us? And, thankfully, people just embraced it but you have no clue until the day and you are sitting there anxiously waiting to see what people think. It’s just a really cool process and it’s fun to take the risk and see what happens.
So, if I can avoid it, I’ll try not to get another desk job, but every now and then that kind of thing pops up and you have to do what you have to do. So far, we’ve got a cool little fan base and people are interested in Dr. Tran sculptures and stuff like that. I would love to see that! Nothing I’ve ever done has been made into a toy, so, it would, of course – (a guy in an Optimus Prime costume walks by). Optimus! I’m a big Optimus Prime fan and I’m a big Destro fan.
Really? What about Destro?
I haven’t seen any Destros walking around the Con this year. We hide Destro in all our films.
Really?
We don’t tend to tell people where they are since technically Destro is copyright trademark Hasbro Inc., whatever it is. But we love ‘em so on the lowdown we stick him in there.
Is he somewhere in Dr. Tran?
There is a Destro reference, yes, somewhere.
And Beyond Grandpa?
He’s in Grandpa too. I’m not sure I should be telling you that.
No, it’s OK. That can be off the record if you like.
We put a thing on the web site showing where he is in Grandpa.
Well, thank you very much for your time.
Cool, man. Thank you for asking me to do this. This was fun.
Director: Rick Schroder
