Max Keane is the creator of Netflix’s new family friendly animated program Trash Truck, which premieres this Tuesday November 10th. Keane, son of Oscar winner Glen Keane (Dear Basketball, Over The Moon), is excited for audiences to experience this sweet, personal show and read the companion book.

Jackson Murphy: My cousin’s two and a half year old son loves when the garbage truck comes by every week. He goes to the window. He sees it. He’s gonna fall in love with this show. It seems like the inspiration for you was your son and his love of garbage trucks.

Max Keane: Yeah, absolutely. And I love hearing stories about other kids who run to the window, too. When my son Henry was one and a half, he was completely obsessed with them. And I started to feel like, ‘What’s wrong with him?’ (laughs) We’d have to follow the garbage trucks and we’d have to wait on the street until they were out of sight, and he’d have to flip over every garbage can lid if we walked down the street. I was like, ‘This is a weird obsession.’ And then I went on YouTube and saw that there’s a whole world of little kids who are obsessed with garbage trucks and families who are all supporting it. It’s a funny, wonderful thing.

Max Keane:And that’s kind of how I got into wanting to make this show – seeing how excited [kids get seeing] this truck that I pretty much never really saw. I don’t think I ever saw a garbage truck until this one morning when I was standing up holding Henry, and it was this cold, foggy morning. And I could see down the road these flashing lights. As the truck was pulling up, it was like a creature, almost, coming to visit us. It pulled up in front of us and grabbed the trash and picked it up really high and dumped it and made all this noise and put the trash can down. I saw it for the first time and I said, ‘Henry, I get it. This thing is amazing.’ And then as the truck rolled away, it rumbled. The driver honked the horn, and Henry leaned out of my arms and said, ‘Bye, Trash Truck.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, man!’

That night I told him a really long-winded bedtime story about a little boy who’s best friend was a garbage truck, and it got me really excited about this relationship between a little boy and his best friend who is the most amazing thing to him. But to everyone else it’s very ordinary. After that, I told the idea to Gennie Rim, our producer, and Glen. And they thought there was something there and we should start developing it.

JM: Wow. I love the relationship on the show between Hank and Trash Truck. And I love listening to the truck noises. Did you go to real garbage trucks and get some of those noises for the show?

MK: (laughs) Man, you’re so right on. Those sounds are such an important aspect of the character and how the audience relates to that specific type of truck. I didn’t go and do any recordings of the truck, but our sound designer, Jamey Scott, who was phenomenal and really brought a lot of character to these sounds… I believe he did do some recording on his street of trucks going by.

JM: And because Henry was the inspiration, how much input did he have on any of the stories for these episodes?

MK: (laughs) I think my family had a ton of input, even if they didn’t know it. In a way, I kind of just plagiarized their lives and thought of the things we’ve done together and the things I’ve watched them go through… or memories I had growing up. Those are the things I wanted to create stories about. Simple little things like going to the movie theater… a really big, exciting moment for kids. And what’s it like for a garbage truck to go to these places with [Hank]. There’s this blurry line between reality and imagination with kids.

JM: The “Movie Theater” episode is really sweet, and I could tell in watching it how personal the story feels. And I love the fact that everybody can go into the movie. It doesn’t matter if you’re a raccoon, a bear, a mouse or a Trash Truck. It’s so lovely. Do you remember going to the theater and seeing some of your dad’s movies on the big screen – his characters coming alive – and then translating that into this episode?

MK: I remember seeing The Little Mermaid, and that was a pretty amazing experience… seeing this character [Ariel] you can kind of connect to, ‘I remember my dad was drawing her.’ But probably at the time, I was maybe more focused on how much popcorn I have left. Do I need to get more soda? Are my Twizzlers running out? Going to the movies… I remember the sticky floor, the funny carpet, all the crazy movie posters.

JM: You translate that into what Hank and Trash Truck and the other animal characters see. You capture that very well.

MK: Thank you.

JM: So Glen voices Trash Truck and Grandpa Mel. And your son Henry does the voice of Hank. Is that right?

MK: Yeah. And my daughter does the little girl, Olive, his sister. And my wife does the Mom.

JM: Wow. How was it directing your family and bringing them into this?

MK: It was amazing. It was like a wonderful, fun thing to do. I had the greatest time working with the whole cast together. I really wanted the relationship of Hank and Trash Truck to feel genuine. I knew that there’s a natural connection and warmth between my son and his grandpa. So that would be a very easy, believable communication – back and forth that these two could have together. And also growing up, I remember my dad would tell me stories and he would use lots of sound effects. And he was very animated, pardon the pun. Trash Truck doesn’t speak – he talks in Truck-ese. Hank speaks that language and understands him. This is a really perfect fit to have this big, sweet, loveable character who’s almost like a grandparent. There’s that same sense of warmth from Trash Truck as a character.

And he does all these sound effects, which is great. I’ll get my dad in the booth and ask him to keep making “Honk” noises. And it was wonderful because it was so easy to communicate with your own family. Henry was phenomenal. I loved the realness that he would give when he would deliver a line. When he started… I would deliver him a line, and then he would repeat me. But he would always do it better, and he would always put a funny little inflection on a word that was such a true kid-ism. I love that texture to the show that the Hank voice is really a six-year-old boy, and my daughter’s voice is really a five-year-old little girl. I think those things will play a big role in connecting to the audience. Little kids do appreciate hearing a version of their own voice, in a sense, in the world of the show they’re watching. It makes it a little more acceptable and believable.

JM: And relatable.

MK: Absolutely.

JM: In the first episode, “Four Wheels & Flies”, there’s a really nice handmade slideshow [contraption] that’s the cornerstone of the episode. How did you come-up with that?

MK: At the time, we were doing some VR exploration and I was writing this episode about Trash Truck learning to fly. And I thought, ‘maybe it’s like a VR simulator that they can get Trash Truck to feel like he’s flying.’ And then it was like, ‘that feels out of place. You don’t wanna put VR goggles on a big truck. That’s kind of weird. What else could it be?’ I like that this world feels tactile and that it feels like… junk, essentially. They can use some creativity and try to figure out how to make this flying contraption simulator. I remember doing all kinds of things like that as a kid – lots of little inventions. So this felt like a good way of trying to give Trash Truck that experience of flying.

JM: There’s a special Trash Truck Christmas episode coming December 11th. What can you share?

MK: I love this Christmas episode. It’s 23 minutes long. Basically Trash Truck saves Christmas. (laughs) Hank and Trash Truck are friends with Donny [a raccoon], Walter [a bear] and Miss Mona [a rat]. Sadly, none of them have experienced Christmas because, well, they’re animals. Hank wants to show them what Christmas is, and through the process of trying to show them how to make Christmas happen, they end-up meeting Santa and have to give him a hand with Christmas. It was really fun to make. It was a lot of work. Dwarf, the animation studio, did a beautiful job with all the animation and the lighting and rendering.

JM: And a Trash Truck companion book from HarperCollins is out now. How did you get involved with this?

MK: That was such a wonderful thing we were able to make. The idea evolved into the show, which is really special. Dominique Bazay at Netflix, who’s the one who really saw the potential in Trash Truck. She and Melissa Cobb were the ones who were able to bring Trash Truck into the Netflix animation hub and get this project made. Dominique was the head of pre-school animation, and she suggested that we should make a book concurrently. And it’d be fun to have that maybe come out before the show. While we were making episodes, I was working on this book.

I wanted to make a book that – if you’re walking through Target or if you’re on Amazon and you’re gonna pick up a book… if you’re a dad with a garbage truck-loving kid, I’d just find it. I’d Google, ‘garbage truck book’. And I would just pick it up because I knew it had something he would like. If a parent were to do that, you didn’t have to have any knowledge of the show. It could just be a self-contained little story about this boy and this truck. I loved making the book. There’s something really special about this whole project that’s tried to allow me to do things that I’ve never done before, which is becoming sort of normal for me. I never made a children’s book. I never made a show. But I got the opportunity to do that with this.