July 14th, 2020 
Jackson Murphy 
Cleopatra in Space is a new DreamWorks Animation series debuting this Wednesday July 15th on the brand new NBC-Universal streaming service Peacock. It’s about 15-year-old Cleo who goes through a portal and ends-up 30,000 years in her future. Will she ever make it home? EP Doug Langdale (The Adventures of Puss in Boots) talks about making the sci-fi adventure show, which is based on a popular graphic novel series.
Jackson Murphy: How do you feel about Cleopatra in Space being a part of this big Peacock launch?
Doug Langdale: I’m just really excited to have it finally be seen. It’s been done for a while, and it’s been aching to get out there. And it’s nice that it will be available. And it seems like it’s gonna be a great streaming service, so I’m glad we’re there.
JM: Yes – with all kinds of DreamWorks content. The title is such a hook. Was that what initially attracted you to this project, along with the graphic novel?
DL: Yeah – I used to tell people the title of the show and then be like, ‘Now you know what it’s about.’ It kind of sums it up. The graphic novels are great. When I first looked at them, I knew, ‘Obviously – this is a series’. [DreamWorks] tried to make it into a feature for a while, and it just seems like it lends itself so much better to serialized storytelling.
JM: And what I like about the introduction / the first episode is that Cleo immediately feels the impact of knowing she may never see her father again… but also has to quickly adjust to this new lifestyle and all her new friends. How was it making sure those emotions came across clearly and effectively in a family-friendly show?
DL: It was interesting because it’s a real move-forward story. It does not stop. Stuff happens and then more stuff happens. Fortunately, Cleo is a real move-forward kind of person. She’s okay with not having a lot of time to stop and think about stuff. It worked out. There obviously are places where we pause a bit and she has a moment to take-in what’s going on. But the story doesn’t stop. It really does keep going. And in future episodes it goes pretty far.
JM: What was the process of designing Cleo’s look and personality: combining the Ancient Egyptian history with this futuristic flare?
DL: It was a pretty involved process, in part because they had been developing the show at different incarnations for a while, so there were different designs before we got to where we finally wound up. Obviously we had the graphic novels as a starting point. But there’s always a thing that happens where part of the process of getting designs that everyone liked is getting to the point where there’s no more time. Coincidentally you always get approval right around that point where you have run out of time. In addition to coming-up with the look… it was also the uniforms that they have in the Academy they’re in. There are different colors for different divisions in the school and emblems. There’s a tremendous amount of stuff that had to be designed for the first episode.
JM: How was it making sure the stories you’re telling weren’t heading down traditional sci-fi pop culture territory?
DL: You try to find a balance. There are certain story tropes in science fiction that are gonna be familiar to people, and you want to make use of that familiarity because you’re telling 21-minute stories – so you can’t literally explain everything about the world from the ground up. But then you also wanna take what’s familiar and do something a little bit different with it. You wanna have that degree of familiarity and robots and aliens and spaceships and lasers and the things that people expect from science fiction. You have to put your own spin on it. And often you’ll start out telling a story that’s more familiar and then halfway through just kinda go, ‘You know what? Is there anything else we can do here?’ Sometimes you’re saved by going off on a tangent and realizing the tangent is the story. Sometimes it’s driven by the specifics of the group of characters you have together.
JM: Professor Khensu the cat is great. I love listening to Sendhil Ramamurthy’s voice performance. How was it working with him, and what were your overall goals with this character?
DL: He becomes sort of a surrogate father, and we actually made the choice to have Sendhil’s voice not only be Khensu but Cleo’s father. So that’s him as her dad at the beginning so there would be that little degree of familiarity to his voice. It was an interesting process because we were picturing someone more bruff when we were casting. And then Sendhil came in and did something much smoother and more sophisticated than what we had been thinking of – and it was just like, ‘We can’t hear him any differently now.’ That’s the voice. His performance really influenced the directions that the character went. He became a little bit more intellectual and less actiony. Because Cleo is such an actiony, acrobatic-thinking character, it really balanced her out well to have someone a little bit more sensible and down to Earth.
JM: That makes sense. One of the episodes focuses on Cleo being overconfident and having to learn life lessons in unconventional ways. You’ve been in animation a long time. How important is it for you to include these lessons and themes when making a successful episode of animation television?
DL: I don’t really think of it as lessons and learning because kids have as much of a right to be entertained as anyone. I don’t think we need to make everything lesson-based. But if you are following a character who had obstacles, overcoming those obstacles is inherently going to have a lesson involved. If there isn’t a point where they’re learning something, you’re not really telling stories.
JM: The theme song is ‘Written in the Stars’. I like the title because Cleo’s story is about meaning, purpose and destiny. In your animation career, have you believed in and relied on those things when it comes to getting behind various projects?
DL: Only in the sense that when you first find out about a project and you’re first presented with it, you have a gut response to it. When I’ve worked on projects, on rare occasions where my gut response was a little bit negative, it has not gone well. You really have to trust in what that first response is, and this one was very positive. I knew right away that it was something I wanted to work on.
JM: Over the past four months during this COVID time, have you been thinking about other storylines for these characters if the series goes past this first season?
DL: Oh yeah. I have extensive notes on how I see the series proceeding. And it’s pretty weird. Honestly I don’t know if anyone would go for it. My ideas for future seasons are pretty out there. The series diverges from the graphic novels. We sort of pick the same starting point. Mike Maihack told those stories so well – let’s not just re-tell them. Let’s do some different stories with the same character. The ideas that I have kind of dovetail with stuff that Mike did but also go off in some pretty odd directions. I would be very interested to do that. I hope that it happens.
JM: Yeah. A lot of times people want book to screen adaptations to be exactly what it was. Sometimes a lot of fans are upset when that’s not the case. Was it a risk to not just go with what was in the graphic novels, or was that an easy decision?
DL: For me it was pretty easy. And I talked to Mike about it, and he was pretty on board with it and liked it. He’s always felt that the books should leave room for fans to imagine their own stories for the characters. When I talked about going off in some different directions with the series, and just basically offering fans some alternative stories, he was really into that. I know sometimes people expect to see a literal adaptation of the original project, but those books are their own thing, and they’re fantastic. I just didn’t see any need to do that again. Let’s take that set-up and some of those characters and just do something a little different – give the fans something else to enjoy. And hopefully they will.
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