The Very Bad Koalas team: Nicholas Brendon and Steve Loter. And water bottle.
Well, I guess I gotta start somewhere. Let’s see….I’d imagine the first questions anyone might have is who the hell is Steve Loter, why Koalas and can I get Nick’s phone number?
In due time, all these questions will be answered and much, much more (though probably not Nick’s number).
For illumination, let’s travel back (insert wavy Wayne’s World flashback sound effects here) to years back. I’m a bright-eyed animation director/producer working on the relaunch of an action/adventure/comedy children’s TV series. I was high up enough on the food chain to request certain voice actors and actually get them. Being a huge fan of Buffy, I always thought Nick Brendon was a great actor and because he is so animated in real life he would make an awesome animation voiceover actor. He was (of course) brilliant, and everyone was happy. I continued to use Nick for whatever voices I needed. Most recently, he came in for an animated pilot playing an eccentric robot police dog. Between takes, our conversation turned from chit-chat to suggestions that maybe we should do a project together.
The very next day, Nick flooded me with a variety of wild, insane and bizarre ideas. They were brilliant, scattered shots of off-color ridiculousness that needed a larger story to work them into. I went off to try to think of a way to corral all doses of absurdity and came up with the bare-bones idea of two koalas on the run from the law in a psychadellic and strange world. An equally absurd idea, but with a setup that can work in Nick’s demented ideas. Future blogs will detail how we actually write all this stuff together. I’ll let you in on something now, though: The most off-colored, outrageous, disturbing things in the strip will always be Nick’s ideas. If you actually wince or recoil in horror at some of the stuff you’ll see and read, know that Nick is somewhere in sunny California at that minute, smiling in contented glee.
So, in closing, I would like to remind you to “like” our verybadkoalas facebook page and check out Nick’s fan page, all run by our wonderful, overworked webmaster, Jacqui Day (take a bow!) VBK news will be covered by all these sites.
So I guess the final question is why Koalas? I just don’t know, but I can tell you it all came in a dream. Not a happy, friendly dream, but a sweaty nightmare-ish vision, so maybe I just want to get back at the little bastards.
Oh and even if I gave you Nick’s number, it wouldn’t matter since he never answers his phone anyway.
Thanks!
Steve
