Do you like medieval fantasy epics? Well, sorry, Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire is going to make fun of them. Comedy Central's new series spoofs the popular genre. Creators Brad Johnson and Peter Knight previewed the series with us.
Crave Online: What is the tone of comedy in Krod Mandoon? Is it Zucker style, Monty Python?
Peter Knight: Probably it's neither option A or B. I think Get Smart, obviously that goes a little sillier than we intent to go, with the shoe phone and things like that, but just taking a world that has a very particular meaning, the world of spies and high tech gadgetry, and then just spinning the dial to take it into a comedic place is I think what we were after, without ever getting to quite spoof level of "Nice beaver." "Thank you, I just had it stuffed," one of my favorite film jokes of all time. Spoof is kind of the dirty word for us in a way. It's more like we're doing genre comedy I think.
Brad Johnson: The problem with most spoofs is there's no character base. They really don't delve into their character. I think the part of it that hopefully will give it some legs is that you kind of invest in these character. The humor is part of it but you believe in Krod's journey and his broken heart when Aneka breaks up with him. Some of that is that there's emotional stakes on top of just the comedy. I think it's got a layer of that in it that hopefully people will invest in.
Crave Online: And of course there's still pratfalls.
Brad Johnson: Sure. Oddly, the very first joke is one of the oldest jokes of all time but I think it was one of those you have to know right away that you're setting up the most heroic setup you can, riding and all these beautiful shots and coming in like a gunslinger and then boom. How do you say immediately this is a comedy? That was just kind of a way to setup expectations.
Peter Knight: And Monty Python is a thing that people kind of land on a lot when they're trying to figure out what it is that we're after. The funny thing is that there isn't a movie that I've seen more than Holy Grail I don't think. I was one of those annoying kids in eighth grade who would do the Knights who say ni and on and on. Yet on the conscious level, I don't feel like I was pulling on that at all. As much as that's in the DNA, I never felt like, "You know who got it right was Python. That's where I want to be."
Brad Johnson: I would say Python is only the time period. I mean, people look at because they were knights and it was that era of the dark ages, but I think tonally, I don't think it's Python.
Peter Knight: Somebody pointed to the annoying villager as like that's Pythony. I do love them. I bow deeply to Python but as a conscious level of influence it wasn’t a big one for me or for us.
Crave Online: There are so many medieval fantasies out there, how do you make up a new mythology?
Peter Knight: I think the fact that there are so many and I think one reason that there are so many is that there's no barrier to entry. Or the barrier to entry is your imagination. I'm not a huge genre fan. The funny thing is I ended up reading Conan the Barbarian comic books. My best friend as a third greater was this kid named Mark Berkawitz who was reading books like this thick. They had pictures of guys with axes and huge muscles, the great cover art of those books. I just thought as a third grader, there's just not a chance that I could read that book but over here, Conan the Barbarian with pictures, that was my gateway into that world that I loved, a flagon of meat and addressing a woman just as wench struck me as appropriate for that world but also, as I grew up and became interested in comedy, it felt like that's a good way to access comedy as well.
Brad Johnson: I mean, we both read a lot of books. Part of what you do I think in terms of this particular arc of this which is the Eye of Golga Grimna and what not, quite honestly from a comedic standpoint which is it's comedy first in this thing, the genre part of it was it follows pretty closely the hero's journey. Star Wars and the Death Star and the evil villain that has something that can destroy mankind, we just made it a slightly comedic exaggeration of a lot of things that we'd seen before.
Crave Online: The first episode has gays, bestiality, racism - -
Peter Knight: Alleged bestiality.
Crave Online: But you tackle these subjects. What's left for the rest of the series?
Peter Knight: Well, more bestiality.
Brad Johnson: They run across the biclops which is a bisexual Cyclops.
Peter Knight: The Eye of Golga Grimna, one of the pieces for it is you have to have the focal lens which is buried deep in the lair of a dreaded Cyclops, who turns out to be a bisexual bon vivant and self-identifies as a biclops.
Brad Johnson: He prefers to be called a foodie.
Peter Knight: He doesn’t believe in labels. If anything you could call him a foodie.
Brad Johnson: They run across some succubi, some succubuses. In doing the research on succubuses, it didn't quite fit what we needed, although I like the fact that they come at night and they rob men's semen and they impregnate women and that's how they explain in the middle ages unwanted pregnancies or wet dreams. I thought it was very funny and I like the idea of these impossibly beautiful women that would be using men as a vessel and what not. We had them run into some of them who are going to use them to implant a seed and use them as a vessel to actually give birth to their demon spawn, which is not part of the succubus. There's nowhere does that exist anywhere other than eventually somebody will go, "No, succubus will actually impregnate males too." Anything about succubus is just somebody's imagination, so we've added a layer based on our imagination.
Peter Knight: People go, "No, no, no, a leprechaun is not there to get your gold." It's like a leprechaun doesn't exist.
Brad Johnson: Make up your own rules. So whatever helped our plot and our comedy.
Crave Online: How did you come upon the name Krod Mandoon?
Peter Knight: I like the sound of it, simply put. There was a guy I went to high school with that was big and burly and the strongest guy I've ever known. It would take 10 guys my size, I was never a small guy, and we would sneak up on him, get him to the ground, try to tackle him and stay on top of him and he could get off. He was like the Incredible Hulk. It actually was kind of superhuman. He was called Krod because it was dork spelled backwards. The idea was that he was so dumb he couldn't figure out that he was being taunted in that way. This is not an homage to that guy but I like the one syllable, something that sounded a little bit rough but a guy could be made fun of for. That's where Krod came from and Mandoon was just I woke up one morning with it.
Crave Online: How did you get the production value of the sets and costumes?
Brad Johnson: We ended up with a very good budget. It's unusual for somebody not to be complaining about money but we're not complaining about money.
Peter Knight: We'd like to give some back.
Brad Johnson: What happened was this show appealed to the BBC and to Comedy Central. As you know, comedy almost always dies a death somewhere over the Atlantic. There's a few that okay, The Office maybe.
Peter Knight: They can have kind of a cult following among the sophisticated.
Brad Johnson: But original scripted programming, I don't think it's ever been done where they love the script as much as Comedy Central loved the script so they put the amount of money they would pay for a top end sitcom, both of them. Yet we needed a little bit more which is where MRC came in so we had a very healthy budget and when you go to someplace like Hungary where castles exist and these horse and carriages and armament are around, and also the labor costs are not as expensive, you put it all on the screen. It was wonderful what our production designer was able to get.
Crave Online: Did that also have to do with making Krod American?
Brad Johnson: Well, Krod American was a requirement of Comedy Central. Even though Sean is British, he speaks with a very convincing American accent and lives in Studio City. So we got lucky that he kind of is also known in England so it also served both worlds there.
