So far, My Life as a Teenage Robot (2003) is the last short from Oh Yeah! Cartoons to go to series (read: “so far”). Here’s the final interview and album from Jerry Beck’s and Russell Hicks’ Not Just Cartoons: Nicktoons!. And there’s more from the book on Oh Yeah! Cartoons, Random! Cartoons, and The Fairly Oddparents.
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Rob Renzetti, Creator: What made Teenage Robot truly different was the way it looked. Alex Kirwan and my designers gave the show what we called a “future deco” look, which means they brought 1930s influences into designs.
Alex Kirwan, Art Director: We both liked the look of the 1930s Max Fleischer cartoons, and we noticed that no one had really done animation in art deco style. We wanted to see what sort of influence that style could bring to the character designs. We took the “pie cuts” out of the character’s eyeballs, which helped define the genre we were going to use.
Rob Renzetti: We used art deco influences for the architecture and the props, and we tried to get a deco poster feel in all the backgrounds. We made a great-looking and very different world. It’s very sophisticated, but not too sophisticated for kids.
Alex Kirwan: We loved the look of the old Astroboy cartoon series, because you can feel all the cool things that you associate with anime and science fiction. One of the things we loved about Astroboy was the weird hairstyles that made humans look like cartoon animals or birds. We latched onto that right away.
Rob Renzetti: We tried to translate that look into Nora and Brad, and, to a lesser degree, Tuck.
Alex Kirwan: It was as if we could define the personalities of the characters by giving them hair that resembled cartoon spiders or birds, or maybe even cat ears. It was cool.
Rob Renzetti: That includes Jenny too, who is a robot and has no reason at all to have two ponytails stuck up on her head. We gave her a reason by making them into jets. Originally, the ponytails were supposed to give her a kind of Mickey Mouse silhouette, and, in fact, we often mistakenly called them ears.
Alex Kirwan: Some things that became important to the production were not part of the show. Every year Nickelodeon holds a Halloween event where the employees bring their children and their friends into the studio.
Rob Renzetti: There’s an ocean of kids– thousands of them.
Alex Kirwan: Each Nick production would build a haunted house, and every year the houses got bigger and the crews more competitive. In our last year we built a giant flying saucer facade over part of our production area, and a cardboard city that the saucer had invaded.
Rob Renzetti: Kids could walk through our demolished city and then into the flying saucer and see aliens. We had an elaborate diorama with Jenny being attacked and electrocuted by aliens, and we built a life-size replica of Queen Vexus with light effects. We had Eartha Kitt, who voiced the character, record some cackling for our replica.
Alex Kirwan: That haunted house was so elaborate that it took quite a chunk out of our production time to built it. A large portion of our crew was not only working hard to meet our show’s deadlines, but also to assemble and paint these cardboard buildings. We took almost as much pride in them as we did in the show, and the kids were just thrilled.
