Twisted ToyFare Theatre: Behind the Scenes Week 4

August 6, 2008 on 9:44 pm | In TTT, Twisted ToyFare |

Continuing our regular series peeking behind the scenes of “TTT,” here are the storyboards for “Catch A Rising Starscream,” as drawn by former ToyFare Editor Zach Oat.

JON SAYS: This was one of those TTT’s that really changed a lot from the initial idea. As far as I can remember, it started with a long standing idea to do a Mexican bootleg toy script - mainly because of our love of one bootleg toy we’d found called “Spader-Man”. Originally it was all about Megatron in Mexico and we were going to cut back and see what Starscream was doing when he was gone, but we started thinking Starscream was the better “A” story…it was hard coming up with a real story about the bootlegs. And of course, the whole strike thing came from the Writer’s strike (which I proudly marched in, if I can have a completely pointless digression. Seth Meyers gave me a whistle!).

JUSTIN SAYS: Believe it or not, this Twisted ToyFare (which ran in issue # 130) was the first full-length strip EVER to focus on the Transformers. As long as I’ve been with the magazine, we’ve been trying to figure out a way to tackle a Transformers strip, but it always eluded us. Finally, we realized the secret was to do the same thing we do with our G.I. Joe and most of our Marvel strips: focus on the villains. For some reason in Twisted ToyFare, villains are just usually normal guys who are trying to get by, whereas heroes are insufferable tools. The note in the final script to read all of Soundwave’s dialogue in Soundwave’s voice in order to make it funnier came from the fact that, in our planning meeting, Zach, Jon and I were all doing the voice, and it’s true: none of his lines would really be funny unless you read them like that.