Twisted ToyFare Theatre: Behind the Scenes Week 5

August 21, 2008 on 7:46 pm | In TTT, Twisted ToyFare | 2 Comments

JON: Continuing our regular series peeking behind the scenes of TTT, here are the storyboards for The Rambo Connection part two, as storyboarded by me, Jon Gutierrez (and not a drunk five year old, as you might’ve thought).

JUSTIN: This episode appeared in ToyFare #135, which went on sale last week in comic shops. Rush out and buy it now before you attempt to read any more of the behind the scenes, because it’s not going to make much sense otherwise. This strip went through a lot more changes than your average TTT, including going from a two-parter to our very first three-parter, so the behind-the-scenes write-up is going to be a little longer than normal as well. Let’s start off with the storyboards themselves.

JON: Exactly as you’d expect from our first three-parter, this was a pretty tough one to figure out. Especially since we were writing it with the intention that it be a two parter and that we’d wrap everything up here. Justin came up with the idea to do a third part and stretch out the Seagal fight. In our original version, it was everyone fighting in one place and each would only get one beat for their individual jokes.

This is the first strip that I really started adding in visual jokes in the storyboards, rather than just figuring out how figures would be in each panel. For example, I was trying to figure out what Seagal’s house would be like and combing his ego and Buddhist beliefs, that he’d have a giant gold Buddha in front with his own head on it. It’s really weird to have a random thought like that and later get to see our Dylan Brucie (our photographer) and Jairo Leon (our designer) really make it look amazing.

And if you read our part one post, you may remember that I was beating myself senseless for my crappy looking storyboards. I’m still not an amazing artist, but I’m not as ashamed to show these as the last one. I actually prefer my version of Dolph painting the tiger to the finished strip as, in my mind, the tiger should’ve been really confused. It’s hard to convey that with a toy tiger.

JUSTIN: Here’s how this whole thing went down, and it should prove once and for all that I’m a massive control freak. Like I said, this strip had gone through a number of changes (I could probably write a novel on this, but I’ll try to keep it reasonably brief). It was originally pitched out by TTT contributor Chris Ward this way:

“Somewhere Over the Rambo: Rambo enlists fellow washed up action stars like Ah-nuld, Van Damme and Bruce Willis to go on one last mission together, to try and find out why the Manly Men of Manly Movies just aren’t in demand anymore, and why shrugging, mop-top nerds like Jim from The Office have taken their place. They’ll get to the bottom of this….by using exploding tip arrows and giving each other high fives whenever the best punny one-liner is given. In the end, the answer lies with “The Wizard of Jaws,” who turns out to be the glorious
visage of Patrick Swayze at his peak.”

This idea was in turn inspired by the Manly Movie Mamajamas, massive semi-regular movie nights that the men of Wizard Entertainment past and present hold to watch dumb action movies starring some of these guys (but that’s a post for another day).

In a very long email I actually outlined a whole story based on the assumption that these guys would be trying to figure out why they don’t get movie roles anymore, and where it turns out the villain is the shape-shifting entity known as CGI, and then the writers began tossing ideas back and forth based on that. But, as often happens in TTT meetings, when the main writers actually sat down in the meeting to finalize the outline they ended up walking out with something very different than they walked in with.

This meeting took place during my “sabbatical,” and I wasn’t in the finalization meeting. The outline that they ended up going with was very much like the part one that you read in ToyFare #134, except the identities of the villains weren’t revealed at the end of the first part. The Manly Men spent much of part two trying to figure out who the kidnappers were, which involved a crime computer, a blonde hair belonging to Brigitte Nielsen, and accosting Flavor Flav. When I came back to ToyFare they were about to shoot part one, and when I read the outlines, I really thought it needed to go in a different direction.

Particularly I thought that we needed to beef up the action, especially in part two. This was a strip about four action stars who kidnap four other action stars from four OTHER action stars, and as the outline was written, nobody threw a punch until maybe the second-to-last page of the entire shebang…and even then it wasn’t our main characters doing the fighting.

We went back to the writers and asked for more ideas with only one goal – make it as over-the-top violent as possible. When we actually sat down in the meeting (after part 1 was complete), we realized that we had enough beats that squeezing it all into one part would make it feel very rushed. We decided to make it a three-parter (mirroring the three-act structure of the action movies we were parodying) and save the climactic battle with Seagal for next issue.

So how does that all go down? You’ll have to pick up ToyFare #135 (on sale September 10th in comic shops) to find out!

(Like Jon, I also want to specially call out Dylan and Jairo for their work on this issue. Dylan really went to town on the smelting factory, and the idea for having the arm wrestling match happen over a stream of molten metal was all him. And Jairo’s work on the last splash panel was fairly heroic – I’m hoping to make it available on the blog as a wallpaper soon. Finally, I would like to point out that I’m personally most proud in the final script of Jean Claude Van Damme’s accent, which has never been spoken aloud by any human being.)