August 27th, 2024 
Jackson Murphy 
Adam and Craig Malamut are the creators of new animated comedy series Universal Basic Guys, which joins the iconic FOX Animation Domination lineup on Sunday Sept. 8 at 8pmET / 5pmPT (live to all timezones after an NFL doubleheader). They discuss the fun characters, storylines and South Jersey inspirations and what shows like The Simpsons and Family Guy have meant to them. (This Animation Scoop Q&A was edited for length and clarity. Images Courtesy: FOX)
Jackson Murphy: Welcome to the Animation Domination lineup. Adam, how does it feel?
Adam Malamut: It’s very surreal. We were at Comic Con and you see this giant mural and it’s got Peter Griffin and Homer Simpson and Bob Belcher, and then there’s Mark Hoagies there. I don’t know. It feels like we’re in a Make a Wish situation or something.
JM: It’s amazing the impact that Animation Domination has had on San Diego Comic-Con over the years. I was there in 2019. I saw the giant displays, and I [recently] saw some photos and some video of you guys. Craig, you gave away $3,000 at San Diego Comic-Con. How did that happen?
Craig Malamut: Oh, it was a very exciting opportunity to wield a large check, which I’ve always wanted to receive, but it’s almost as fun to give away. And it was really fun. We had a lucky member of the audience look under their bag and they had a special sticker on it. They got $3,000. Got to experience a UBI [Universal Basic Income] for a month.
AM: Definitely less exciting to give it away than to get.
CM: I was trying to figure out how I could get that in my pocket. It was a little too big and also in the fine print, apparently we weren’t eligible.
JM: Okay. But I’m sure you guys are probably doing pretty well under FOX’s umbrella with this show, which is good and so well-deserved. I have seen the first episode, which is airing Sunday, September 8th. It’s called “Pet Projects”. We’ll get into it in a little bit. Adam, you guys have been fascinated with animation and the animation comedy space for a long time and have sort of been building to this moment. Take me briefly on the journey to this point.
AM: Sure. Since we were kids, we always liked to draw with each other and Craig was younger than me. So I would always be able to draw better than him. And that helped feed my ego as a kid. And I would always perform and do voices and stuff like that. I’d make Craig laugh. And Craig was thinking to himself, “That was a dumb voice”, or “That was very funny”. And I was thinking I could cut this audio together and make this guy famous. I was never the best artist. I could do voices, but I wasn’t the best at that. I can make people laugh. We compose music. But we weren’t the best. What we were good at was putting all that stuff together, the drawing, the voices, the music. And I was working out in LA and I was producing game shows and kids shows and clip shows. And one day I said, “You know what? If I don’t make it happen, I’m never going to do the animation thing.” And so I just taught myself how to animate. I started watching internet videos of how to animate. I started making stuff. I would record myself just talking to myself and then animate over it. I didn’t know what I was doing. So the characters didn’t do anything except weirdly move their shoulders and heads and talk.
So I made this one cartoon called “Sports Friends”. It was two baseball players, Chase Utley and Ryan Howard, talking about how much they love the feeling of hitting home runs. And it somehow went a little viral in Philadelphia sports media. And then I kept making stuff. And that cartoon became a show called “Sports Friends” on Yahoo Screen. They ordered a bunch of episodes and I was in way over my head. So I needed some help. At the time Craig was getting his Masters in Astrophysics and I pulled him away to help me make backgrounds.
Craig and Adam Malamut
CM: So I basically followed in Adam’s footsteps. I learned how to animate using the online tutorials and was thrown to the deep end because we already had a second season order. I was figuring out how to rig a face and make the eyes blink and make the mouths move. And I ended up doing that so much I got pretty decent at it by the time we got asked by Bleacher Report if we could make a sports cartoon for them. And that’s when we made “Game of Zones”, which became an even bigger viral hit. And that was something we did for seven seasons with Bleacher Report. It was a lot of fun.
AM: So we ended up going in-house for six or seven years and we went from doing everything ourselves to over working with a production manager who helped us build an animation team. And then we would just do the writing and some of the voices and other things. We wouldn’t be doing much of the animating. So we scaled up and learned how to scale up there. So it basically was a great prep for the big leap after that, which was to do a network show, which is on another level.
JM: Congratulations. That’s amazing. And I’m a big Philly sports fan. Was just at Philly’s Yankees games.
AM: Yeah, this guy knows! There it is.
JM: (laughs) Yeah, love Philly sports and love this concept, which is brothers who lose their jobs and they get $3,000 a month in a new, basic income program. Craig, you get this opportunity to do a network show. A bunch of ideas probably in your heads for a long time. How did you land on this specific one?
CM: We went through a lot of different ideas. At first, we had the characters that we knew we loved, Mark Hoagies and Hank Hoagies, different names, but we were trying to figure out where we want to place these characters so they can be their funniest. At first we had some different ideas like they ran pest control or they were security at a college campus.
AM: They were working at a country club.
CM: Yeah, they were in a country club selling hot dogs in the ninth hole. At the time it was the pandemic and we were working from home and Andrew Yang was running for President. He was talking about UBI and this future of automation. And we were thinking automation is going to become more and more of a thing in our society and the future, with AI growing. And we said, “This is only going to get more and more relevant. So what if we put these guys in this UBI kind of situation that he was describing?” You have this problem where you’re told by society, “We don’t need you to work anymore.” Yet we all define ourselves by our jobs. What happens to the guys who define themselves by their jobs? Suddenly they have an identity crisis and they’re like, “You’re free. You don’t have to do anything anymore. Just go explore. You don’t have to worry about putting food on the table or where you’re going to sleep at night, cause you have enough resources for that.”
Now they just have to figure out how to use their time. And we thought this is really fun because this character of Mark Hoagies is this know it all who thinks he can do anything. And now he has the time and the resources to put his money where his mouth is. And we’ll see. Can he actually become an airline pilot or become a bowhunter or save a life? There’s different things he wants to do each month as he gets these checks. It was a vehicle for the thought experiments we would have when we would be sitting there, you’re watching YouTube videos and you’re like, “I could do that”. Or you’re looking out the window while you’re trying to get work done. You’re thinking about what you could be doing with your time. And these are people that can actually go and do those things and fully pursue any hobby they’ve ever dreamed of.
AM: There’s a lot of workplace comedies. It’s kind of a post-workplace comedy. What if there’s not enough jobs for people and we’re able to get people’s basic needs met, and they can just explore whatever they want to explore? What happens? So that was the sandbox we went to play in.
JM: A lot of possibilities with what you can do with storylines. Adam, you voice Mark and Hank Hoagies. Now, tell me this, because as I watched “Pet Projects”, the two characters I’m about to name are not brothers, but tell me that they are inspired by Fred and Barney, because I got that right away.
CM: To me, it’s more like that they’re just like a classic comedy… We wanted to lean into that classic comedy duo and not get too clever with that. It was just fun to have the classic, “Yeah, I got some big ideas, dude” this and that. And then the, “Oh man…” the guy who looks up to him, the sycophant guy. It is that classic like Fred Flintstone, Barney, Laurel and Hardy, Cow and Chicken thing. SpongeBob and Patrick… a little bit kind of vibe. We just wanted to do that classic comedy thing. Although Hank is based on Craig when we were growing up and I was the older brother. He used to think I was a cool older brother and looked up to everything I did. And so that was Hank to Mark. And it’s sort of based on that where he’s just a sounding board that thinks everything I do is brilliant or cool. But back when he was like, six, and I was 12 or 13. Yeah, 12 or 13.
JM: Craig, in this “Pet Projects” episode, there’s a chimp that they encounter and this chimp is wild!
CM: The chimpanzee was my favorite animal growing up. And I always thought I would love to own one. And then as you get older, you realize it would be a horrible idea to own a chimp. And we were researching it. What’s the actual challenges of owning a chimp? People saying it is a nightmare. It’s like having the terrible toddler that never grows up and is way more dangerous. And so we thought, “Oh that’s perfect for Mark and Hank. They would think this is a dog 3. 0. This is awesome. It’s way smarter than a dog. It can get you White Claws and serve you while you’re trying to watch your TV program. The reality was much different as we learn.
JM: (laughs) You know what I realized, Adam, in watching this episode? There are many great animated shows on television and streaming platforms and everywhere, and you talk about a sandbox, but what I think you do with this… and sometimes a lot of shows put themselves in one central location, or they have to be a certain way… This is a show in which anything goes. Did you really have that mentality as you’re crafting these episodes and coming up with these ideas that truly anything goes?
AM: Yeah, I would say that anything goes as far as what they get up to, although we definitely stick to certain rules, which we didn’t even realize until we started making the show. So as you go, you start to realize, “No, they wouldn’t do this, or they would say this, or that would be more grounded here, but then we go crazy here.” So yeah, I would say though, that anything goes, and there’s a lot of flexibility. The problem is as we’ve learned, it’s almost like choice paralysis where there’s too many things they could do. On another show it’s “Okay, this takes place on a spaceship. So we know they’re going to encounter this and this.” We’re like, “Oh God, they could do anything. What should they do?”
CM: We always say they should go to space, and we never sent them to space yet.
AM: But who knows? Maybe in season two.
JM: I was gonna say, you’re already renewed for season two, which is awesome. So how do you guys juggle keeping season one and season two straight?
CM: We’ve already written season one. It’s all packaged and ready to go. So season two is really just building on that. It’s about expanding the world, exploring our characters on a deeper level, finding new characters… and seeing how much further we can push their crazy ideas.
AM: It’s honing in. We do have a show that isn’t very serialized. Every episode is pretty self-contained. There’s a few things that carry over. Yeah, I think that in season two, we just wanted to push it and get better at doing the show and find it a little bit more. You start to get better at the processes and stuff like that. Everything was new. Even though we had done animation at Bleacher Report, it was just on a whole new level here. So the first season was finding it and surviving and now in season two, we feel like we’re just getting a little better at making a network show.
JM: Shout-out to South Jersey. What are we going to experience from South Jersey in this first season?
AM: Oh, dude, you’re going to get our version of the Wawa. You’re going to get our version of a diner that’s in Cherry Hill where we grew up. You got a little flavor of the Birds. They go down to shore. Water ice, we got the water ice. But mainly if we focus on the intense intellectual culture of South Jersey, where all the geniuses live and you’re just going to get to know some of the absolute most brilliant minds you’ve ever seen down here in South Jersey.
JM: I think Fox is going to seriously… when they’re looking at the ratings, they’re gonna go, “Alright, what’s that share? What’s that rating in that share in South Jersey? Hopefully it’s very high.
AM: Yeah, if we don’t get a good rating in South Jersey, we’re in trouble!
JM: The show starts Sunday September 8th, live after football on FOX. And then the time period premiere is Sunday, September 29th at 8:30pm, right after “The Simpsons”, which is an animation maker’s dream come true right there.
AM: Yeah, I think someone actually made a mistake in scheduling and we’re just rolling with it. I’m just kidding. It is pretty surreal. When we found that out it was one of those special moments that really still hasn’t really sunk in.
CM: We grew up watching these shows on FOX.
AM: Yeah, FO has always been like the mecca of animation. I remember freaking out the first time I watched “Family Guy” after the Super Bowl, and I thought to myself “Man, I’d love to do that. That’d be a dream.” And then to be here doing this and seeing it go on after “The Simpsons”, it’s really special. It’s not lost on us.
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