March 2nd, 2022 
Jackson Murphy 
Live-action superhero series The Boys has been a massive success for Amazon since its Summer 2019 debut. Now there’s a new eight-episode spinoff show premiering this Friday March 4th on Prime Video. The Boys Presents: Diabolical consists of eight distinct 12-15 minute stories involving characters in and around The Boys universe. Each episode showcases a different hand-drawn animation style. Executive Producer Simon Racioppa joins me for a super Animation Scoop Q&A. (This interview was edited for length and clarity.)
Jackson Murphy: My uncle is a HUGE fan of The Boys. These are eight episodes — all distinct storylines that really celebrate the art of hand-drawn animation. How did you see that power of hand-drawn animation firsthand as you were making these episodes?
Simon Racioppa: Oh my God. We brought on eight incredible directors — a different director for every episode — and an incredible supervising director, Giancarlo Volpe, who came from the world of Avatar and The Dragon Prince. And so many of the artists, like the artists who worked on our Looney Tunes style episode come from that world of loving fine, hand-drawn art. You should see some of the design work. We could publish a book with all the design work that went into this series. And maybe we will.
JM: Yeah.
SR: It’s a treat seeing other amazing artists interpret your work — my work and the work of The Boys — into this new medium and take it and make it alive. That was one of the best treats of the show — seeing that come to life.
JM: It’s so cool watching these episodes. And you mentioned the Looney Tunes episode, so I have to mention “Laser Baby’s Day Out”. It’s so fun. Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg are the writers of it. I love the comedy and the humor, the spirit and the innocence, but there’s also legitimate action. Why do you love that episode so much?
SR: I love that episode for about a hundred different reasons. One is: obviously, Seth and Evan’s script right from the get-go was written without a single word… it has one word of dialogue, ONE word of dialogue! Right at the end. Other than that it’s a silent movie, essentially. I mean, it’s got sound effects. That’s a challenge to show the whole episode, visually… have all the ideas play out, but still emotions and characters for the audience to follow along. That was amazing, even from a script standpoint.
And then we got our two directors on that, Crystal and Derek Thompson, our two veterans of that style of animation. They worked on Space Jam and Animaniacs. We managed to find a studio that also worked on Animaniacs. We wanted to put together a team that did that — that lived and breathed that style of Roger Rabbit, Looney Tunes classic animation. And even our composers, Steve and Julie Bernstein, had just gotten off composing for Animaniacs. We did a 29-piece orchestra based on their composition — we recorded just for that episode. We try to make it as authentic as possible to that kind of animation, which I watched growing up all the time. To get to make that was both a love letter to The Boys and that world of classic, hand-drawn, old school, orchestrated animation.
JM: That is perfect. I’m so glad you brought up the music. I talked with Steven & Julie about a year and a half ago when Animaniacs was just starting back up for Hulu.
SR: Oh great!
JM: They have fantastic insights on music and animation. You wrote the episode “One Plus One Equals Two”, which is about the Homelander. It’s a character study, it’s a drama, but [also] so much action and intensity. Could you tell in writing it (as I was watching it) how intense this episode is?
SR: I was hoping it would come across that way. That’s the goal. The goal of any screenwriter is to convey emotion and intensity from the page to the screen. I was delighted with how it came out. And also, I was a huge fan of The Boys even before I worked on the show, so to get to contribute by writing a little bit of the Homelander’s backstory. It’s only 12 minutes. But a little window to maybe why Homelander is the way he is, that was a treat to get to do that for [main show creator] Eric Kripke. To be part of that world was fantastic.
JM: Nice. I remember being at San Diego Comic-Con in July 2019 and Amazon had all these displays for The Boys and I went, “I think this show’s gonna be something. I think it’s gonna reach people.” And now here we are with an animated spinoff that brings-in these A-listers like Seth Rogen and Aisha Tyler who were already associated with the show. But Awkwafina, Justin Roiland and Andy Samberg [other writers on these episodes] are very familiar with voice acting. What was their interest in coming into this? Was it The Boys show? Was it animation? A little bit of both?
SR: How we did it was: Eric, Evan, Seth, myself and a couple other EPs sat down and we just named a dream list of people whose work we admired… and who we knew or heard were fans of The Boys. And we just started reaching out to them and saying, “Hey, would you like to come and help us write a short film for us, essentially, that takes place in the world of The Boys?” And almost everybody was like, “Yes! That sounds like fun! I would love to do that!” And we were like, “We’ll keep you involved. We’ll consult with you the whole way. We wanna make the Andy Samberg episode of The Boys. We wanna make the Awkwafina episode of The Boys.” So that was our pitch to them.
Almost everybody said “Yes”. We had a couple people who were like, “I’d love to. I just can’t do it right now!” So those people get put on a second list. And hopefully if we get a second season we can revisit them. But it was not hard filling up those eight slots very rapidly early on.
JM: Fantastic. You’re also the EP and showrunner of Invincible, another big hit for Amazon. I interviewed Robert Kirkman for that last year. What have superheroes meant to you throughout your life, Simon?
SR: I grew-up the same way a lot of people my age group did of buying comic books at 7-Eleven… and eventually finding comic book stores once I was old enough to get on a bike and go places. Coming into that world of superheroes… everything from “The Tick”… I was mostly Marvel but I would still read DC at the same time. And seeing that transition of comic books and superheroes going from kind of like this weird, geeky, nerd thing to becoming a little more mainstream and then more mainstream and then appearing in video games. And then seeing the quality of the movies, especially… the movies and TV shows. There were a lot of not great adaptations back when I was younger. There were some good ones, like Tim Burton’s “Batman”. That was a standout. But there were a lot of not-so great comic book movies. So to see people suddenly take that seriously and really explore those stories and characters that meant a lot to me… the fact that I get to participate in that, even a little bit, is a dream come true for the 14 year old me from many years ago.
JM: Absolutely. I saw on your Twitter there’s a video of all these characters from The Boys Presents: Diabolical in this McDonald’s commercial setting. It is the funniest thing I’ve seen in a while.
SR: Oh yeah that’s fun! That came from a bunch of incredibly creative folks at Amazon who put that together as a promotion for the show. I think it’s hilarious. Vought-a-Burger exists in the world of The Boys. So to get to show that… I think they did such an amazing job on it. It was so much fun to watch.
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