March 24th, 2022 
Jackson Murphy 
Emmy nominees Kevin Burke and Chris “Doc” Wyatt (of Rocket & Groot animated series) are executive producers and showrunners of new animated comedy Transformers: BotBots. It premieres tomorrow, March 25th, on Netflix. The mega-popular toy and film brand presents a whole new group of hand-drawn characters — objects and meals at a mall who come to life at night after the doors close. It’s a concept that resonates with all three of us, as you’ll discover in this Animation Scoop Q&A. (This interview was edited for length and clarity.)
Jackson Murphy: I love the show — and the concept behind the show. It’s so fun. Seeing the mall brought back so many memories of my childhood at malls.
Kevin Burke: I come from a generation where the place to go was the mall. If you wanted to see where your friends were. And this was before cell phones. I assumed my friends were at the mall even when I wasn’t at the mall. My assumption was that they were all hanging out and having a great time, and I was missing that. We’re trying to capture that. And we’re also looking at the mall and all these bots hiding there and their different squads. It’s also a microcosm for school. Everyone’s got their own little cliques, if you will, in this group where everyone’s trying to figure out where they belong. And at the heart of it, Transformers: BotBots is about finding unexpected family. But we definitely wanted to lean into the mall aspect of it and make that a component. It’s almost a character in and of itself — what it’s like to be in a mall.
JM: I completely agree. And Doc… if I can call you Doc…
Chris “Doc” Wyatt: Please do! That’s what everyone does.
JM: Alright! What is the coolest part about transforming a story idea into an actual episode?
CDW: Clever wordplay.
JM: Thank you.
CDW: Honestly, that’s the most fun part for me. We write, we produce, we wear a lot of different hats on the series. But getting into the writers’ room and starting with the premise and throwing around ideas and dreaming up gags — and pitching to the group an idea you know would never work and then suddenly the group helps you make it work. There’s an energy in that that I’m very enthusiastic about that’s really at the heart of what we do. Because if we don’t have fun in the writers’ room, it’s really hard to get viewers to have fun with the show.
JM: True. In the first episode… it’s now one of my favorite lines in a show of all-time… when Burgertron calls him and his pals, “A Super-Size Combo Meal of Happiness”.
KB & CDW: (laugh)
JM: Wow! That is so funny. And Kevin, it made me think about Happy Meal toys… the toys at McDonald’s, Burger King and Wendy’s over the years… that I collected and now my four year old cousin plays with. What do you think is the attraction kids have with meals, fast food and toys of their favorite animated movies and shows?
KB: There’s obviously an element where when you’re young, it’s not like you’re sent to the mall by yourself so you can buy your own t-shirts or posters of your favorite movies. But you have to eat! And you’re looking at these things and saying, “Hey — these are the places I go to eat.” Because when you’re young it’s not like you’re sitting at a lot of formal restaurants that are giving away free toys of your favorite movie. So there’s definitely a connection, especially in malls and the food court connection. You can go and get a hamburger “AND a cup of my favorite movie I’ve ever seen?” There’s definitely a component there that we were trying to lean into here.
JM: You succeed with that. And Doc, tell me a little bit about the animation style mix here. Hand-drawn with the characters, but you provide more depth with some of the background objects and the transformations themselves.
CDW: Absolutely. It sort of goes back to having fun at the mall. The BotBots themselves are almost like children. They have a child-like enthusiasm for play, for going out and exploring and finding ways to hang out and have fun. They’re silly and excited. They see the world through new eyes. They were born yesterday — everything is new and fun. We wanted to capture that. One way we felt would be good is to have those sort of photorealistic backgrounds. When you see the background, you’re seeing a mall that looks like a place you might’ve been or like a real-world place. We have these 2D hand-drawn figures in front of these realistic environments. These are fun, out of place, here for the first time exploring… that’s the energy we wanted to bring to it visually.
Kevin Burke and Chris “Doc” Wyatt
JM: I also really like the episode involving the Halloween store… and especially what you do at the end as your transition to another specific season. Very clever.
KB: When we started breaking down ideas for what could happen at the mall, the idea of the seasonal Halloween store and a seasonal Halloween store’s ability to sort of expand and almost infect these other stores was definitely a component that we brought into it. Same with a section of the mall we have called the Dark Side of the Mall, which I feel like everyone’s been to. You turn a corner and all of a sudden the light’s weird and a couple stores are closed and you feel like, “No one’s over here. I shouldn’t be in this section of the mall right now.” We wanted to capture what it’s like to go to a mall, and it’s a pretty universal feeling.
We have the Halloween store, the food court, the Lost & Found… barely working carousels in certain corners. There are definitely aspects of the mall we wanted to capture and see from the perspective of these new bots that have come to life. They don’t have a history of this. The mall is their entire world. They do not know what’s outside of the mall, and they live in fear of being scanned out and never returned. So the mall is a strange, new and exciting place to them and we wanted to see everything from that perspective, which we also think is how kids sometimes see the mall. An escalator can be intimidating — you don’t know where it’s gonna go. And I think parents have always had that experience. We designed this show so parents and kids could watch it together — parents who have a lot of mall experience and kids who have done a lot of shopping. We want people to go shopping and look around and think, “What if that coffee cup is a secret bot?” “What if that pizza right there is a secret bot?” “What if anything is a robot in disguise?”
JM: And then the kids are gonna want to stay til closing and past closing with their parents and see everything come to life!
KB & CDW: (laugh)
KB: I thought it was a kid fantasy when I was young: “Wouldn’t it be great to live in this mall? This is my home and I can go to all these stores.” We’re playing to that aspect as well.
JM: Another cool theme is focusing on squads and the importance of being with your pals. Doc, tell me about the squad that you assembled for this show.
CDW: We just lucked out. We got the best directors and animators. We got a voice cast that really brought everything to life. We got freelance writers to help us out in the writers’ room that really got the show and saw the potential and fun of it. And we got to explore with them the way that the Bots get to explore the mall. It was a great experience, creatively, from top to bottom.
JM: Nice. You two have collaborated on several projects over the years and were Emmy-nominated for Rocket & Groot. Many of the other animated series are based off of toy properties or have toy properties involved, like NINJAGO and Spider-Man. Have your collabs transformed or evolved in any way? Have there been differences with the different times? Is COVID a factor?
KB: Doc and I had already established a way we work. We didn’t sit in the same room together every day. We always worked where we were each writing and we’d send things off to each other. So COVID hasn’t impacted that. It’s impacted the way we do the writers’ rooms. We have to do them on Zoom, which isn’t as much fun because in writers’ rooms you like the little side bits — the little conversations that have nothing to do with the show. But we had a great group of writers. That was a lot of fun.
This is the first-ever Transformers comedy. And it’s a concept that we came up with. We developed it [for] television. Some of the shows we’ve done, such as NINJAGO, there’s already a preexisting lure we’ve moved into. Other shows, such as Spider-Man, there have been many other versions of it before us. This has been a ton of fun because, essentially, we had our own little corner of the Transformers universe that we could create from scratch and had the freedom. We told it to all the writers: “There’s nothing you can watch here to give you an idea of what the show is about. We’re creating it now. What we come up with in this room is going to be the show.” So there’s a great freedom to that and that’s been a great point in our careers and in the process of working together.
JM: It’s amazing — there have been so many existing properties turned into animated shows, or spinoffs. You are creating something from scratch. Yes, it has the Transformers name, but these are new characters that families are going to fall in love with… which brings me to my final question. So, if Michael Bay came to you and said, “Whoa! I love these characters. I wanna take the BotBots and turn it into a feature movie. And I wanna make it crazy, wild and insane,” what would be your reaction to that and how would you want to collab with Michael Bay?
CDW: If he came and said that, I would have nothing but respect for his desire to do that. And I would just ask him, “How big can we make the explosions”?
KB: (laughs) I would agree. I would definitely jump up and down, attempt a backflip [and] most likely fail that backflip. But I would be so excited about this idea because we love these characters. We love this world. We’re hoping everyone else loves them. We made the show we wanna watch. We made the show our kids wanna watch. And hopefully it’s just the start of something awesome.
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