Of all the animated shows on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, the one that’s managed to fly almost completely under the radar – despite being one of the funniest series in recent years – is “Home Movies.” The show’s lead character is eight year old Brendon Small…who is voiced, in what can only be described as an eerie coincidence, by a very funny man who’s also named Brendon Small. “Home Movies” has, season by season, eased its way onto DVD thanks to the fine folks at Shout! Factory. Small took some time to chat with Bullz-Eye about his time at the Berklee College of Music, how the improv nature of “Home Movies” sent many an editor to an early grave, and what’s going on in his life these days. Here’s a clip.
Bullz-Eye: So, getting back to “Home Movies,” you first met up Loren Bouchard when he was working on “Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist,” on Comedy Central.
Brendon Small: Yeah. “Dr. Katz” was kind of wrapping up – I think everyone was kind of ready to let it go, they’d done 4 or 5 seasons, maybe 6 – and that was kind of winding down. And Loren had the opportunity to produce his own show. And I was in the right place at the right time. The odds of getting a show on the air are about a billion, jillion to one, and, luckily, we got one on the air. And that was on UPN, during what I call The Cartoon Boom of ’99, where, like, “Family Guy” came out and all that stuff…a bunch of shows that went away. But we snuck over to Adult Swim (on Cartoon Network) and kept our heads down and nobody noticed us and we got to do four seasons without anybody kind of noticing anything. And we were, like, “They keep on ordering seasons! I don’t know what we’re doing, but somebody likes it!”
BE: Was it hard to get into the mindset of playing an 8 year old…or was it, in fact, surprisingly easy?
BS: You know, it was easy because I didn’t play him as an 8 year old. I think that, in the first few episodes, it was a little bit cutesier. And I was ashamed of that. So I wanted to not play him as cutesy, because that made me sick to my stomach. But it wasn’t difficult. The hard part with me and Bill Braudis when we were writing for “Home Movies” was trying to figure out what to do with Brendon, because we would have to put the story on his back for the most part, and he was kind of a straight man for McGuirk, but we found that we could make him funny and stuff. So, basically, our M.O. was to make him a wise-ass. Always. It’ll be easy. It’ll be fun. And I’ll just play him as whatever age I am at the time, as a wise-ass. Which is kind of what I am, anyway, so it’s incredibly easy.
BE: The feel of the show…the improv feel of the show…is decidedly unique compared to other animated series. How did that come about?
BS: Those are techniques borrowed from “Dr. Katz.” So Loren, being a writer and producer on “Dr. Katz,” brought his know-how from that, and we all kind of tried to make that work for a different show, with more of an ensemble feel, a lot more action, and just trying to tighten up the screws and make it go a little bit faster than Dr. Katz. So that was the whole thing. Dr. Katz used a script, but, when given the opportunity, they would choose improv over the script…though I recall the scripts being terribly funny. Doing a 22-minute episode, we wanted to just make sure that we had a lot of funny jokes there, just in case we weren’t feeling that funny, or we were hung over and couldn’t think that quickly, so we wanted to make sure we had a solid script to work off of…but we also wanted to be able to preserve the conversationalisms that we liked about Dr. Katz during those early seasons of “Home Movies”. So I think you’ll see that come together a little bit more during Season 3. And the ratios of improv versus script are always different…sometimes 70/30, sometimes 50/50…
Click here to read the rest of the interview with Brendon Small.
