Aaron Augenblick chats City Island Season 2

[00:00:00] Aaron, thank you for joining me today on Pop Culture Unplugged. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited. I love City Island on your screen up there. It's exciting. It's exciting for you too.

[00:00:22] July 5th, City Island Season 2 is coming over less than a week, well, a week away actually from today. Yeah. How has this run been for you? I was doing some research last night when everybody went to bed. I watched a few shorts and everything.

[00:00:35] And it's a runaway hit from what I've been seeing. Thank you, number one, for watching the show. It is meant to be watched by people of all ages. So that's great. And yeah, we've gotten lucky. It's been successful for us.

[00:00:52] I think that there's not a lot of shows like it. It was a unique idea having a living city and this little light bulb named Want. And I think one of the things PBS really liked about it was that it was really, really funny.

[00:01:06] It was both funny, weird and hopefully meaningful. And I think that's a unique combination. So for us on PBS Kids, it's been successful and people have really liked watching it. So we're now premiering. We just finished premiering a series of music videos.

[00:01:24] We did 10 original songs that I think tonight, the last episode of that goes up. And then, like you said, next Friday, July 5th, we have the new season start. So we have 30 new episodes this season. What do you think resonates most with the audience about this show?

[00:01:42] What do you think pulls them in? That's a great question. I mean, I think that it's a fun world. I think a lot of kids just get like really little kids that watch the show, like three year olds are just pointing at all the faces.

[00:01:57] They get really excited about like pointing at like there's a face and there's a face like the clouds in the sky and the windows or eyes and the cars drive by and they have faces.

[00:02:07] So I think for little kids, it's just a fun world, not unlike something like Sesame Street where like, you know, wow, there's this weird city out there where there's all these living weird characters. And it was made purposely to be like that.

[00:02:21] Like it's called City Island for a reason, because I wanted to feel like a sort of magical world that you're being transported to and you're getting to hang out there. So there's the fact that it's this kind of weird, magical world.

[00:02:33] But then, you know, for us, you know, with a big, broad sort of fantastical idea like that, it's really important to ground it. And the way to do that is with characters.

[00:02:44] And you know, the core of the show is, you know, Watt, the little light bulb and his best friend, Wendy, who's a kite. And you know, they're real characters to us. Like when we're writing the episode, like Watt is like an incredibly ambitious little

[00:02:56] kid who really wants to be a part of everything. And he wants to meet people and make things. But he doesn't really know how to do anything. You know, so a lot of the comedy comes from that. A lot of the plot lines come from that.

[00:03:05] And Wendy, his friend, is really thoughtful and she's actually really interested in things. And she actually likes learning about other people and books and things like that, which makes her a little more introspective.

[00:03:16] You know, so the balance of these two characters, you know, they're kind of a nice duo. And I think that powers all the stories because, you know, if you have a really interesting world, you know, it's fun for a few seconds or maybe a few episodes.

[00:03:32] But it's the characters that you come back for, I find. So I'd like to think that it's the characters and the world together that make it a show that people like to watch. And it's funny, not funny, but it's like for you, like you went from adult animation

[00:03:45] now to content for kids. Well, like how is that transition for you? What made you decide to jump into that world? Well, so this year is our 25th anniversary. So I started my studio in 99. I think I was 22 maybe and do math.

[00:04:02] And then, you know, for me when I started out, it was because I was an animator. I am an animator, a cartoonist. And I just have always just loved cartoons. And a lot of the wilder ideas that I had, I wasn't seeing in the adult space as much

[00:04:19] like it was still in the time when everyone was saying like, oh, cartoons are for kids, And once we started making these ideas, like I was a big fan of like underground comics and sort of fine art and movies and some of the bigger themes.

[00:04:35] And I just wasn't seeing that, those themes in cartoons as much. So I started a studio so I could be making more adult cartoons. And luckily, I think my interest in adult cartooning sort of coincided with the world

[00:04:51] because not soon after that, adult sims started and you started, you know, primetime animation more and more. And you were seeing some edgier cartoon movies coming out. And then anime became really popular, which also tends to skew a little older.

[00:05:06] So the kind of the sort of path my studio took mirrored the path I think the rest of the world took in saying like, wow, I guess animation doesn't just have to be like, you know, for kids, it could be for adults too.

[00:05:19] What's interesting is over the course of 20 years, I started to become more interested in what was happening in the kids space. Right? So like about maybe a little pre-pandemic about five years ago, I started getting really psyched about like all these cool kid shows I was seeing

[00:05:36] like Adventure Time, City of Ghosts and Regular Show and all these like really interesting shows were getting made that I felt were feeling even more daring than what I was working on in the adult space, which tended to lean towards like sitcoms and things like that.

[00:05:51] So, you know, after 20 years, I was like, you know, I've done a lot of stuff. I've made a lot of cartoons. I'm sort of known for like edgy sort of weird, you know, animation.

[00:06:03] You know, wouldn't it be interesting to see if I could apply these skills to kids cartoons? So around that time, you know, I've been working with a partner named Dan Powell for years and years. He was the showrunner of a show called Ugly Americans.

[00:06:19] He also does the Amy Schumer Show and I Think You Should Leave and all these other cool, you know, edgy comedy shows. And both of us were like, I really want to try something in the kids space. And we're like, let's try it together.

[00:06:30] So we started a company called Future Brain. So Augur Look Studios has been focused on adult animation for, like I said, 25 years. Future Brain is only a few years old. I guess it's five years old at this point. And we are focused completely on kids cartoons.

[00:06:44] And the idea is to put the same level of quality animation, sort of an outsider's viewpoint and hard, big comedy with kids stuff that we would typically do on something like Adult Swim or Comedy Central or Netflix. So that was kind of the inspiration.

[00:07:05] And when we came up with the idea for this company, Future Brain, the first thing we did was say, OK, we're going to have a kids company. What are our shows like? So we got together with all of our favorite creative people, sat around a table and just

[00:07:19] threw out ideas for shows. What was the show that you've never gotten to see or maybe gotten to make? And my pitch was, well, what if we did a show that was like a living city?

[00:07:30] I always loved things like Roger Rabbit and Fleischer cartoons and Betty Boop and the Looney Tunes and Sesame Street where it felt like everything was alive. So I was like, I want to do a show like that. We could make a living city called City Island.

[00:07:45] And if so, the main characters could be a little light bulb and a kite. And that was it. So that was how it was created. Amazing. So I wrote here because I don't want to forget it. Season two, 500 new characters.

[00:07:57] How? How do you come up with 585 new characters at 400 locations? See some of the characters here. You see that all of characters here you can see. So I wonder if I'm blurry now. There we go. So 500 characters.

[00:08:18] Well, I will say as big as the show is, you know, and, you know, as surreal as our visuals tend to be, it's always in service of the storm. That like for the show, when we start a story, you know, our curriculum, because

[00:08:33] it's PBS Kids, so everything on PBS Kids has to be meaningful. So, you know, our curriculum is civics and social studies, and we've expanded it this season to include media literacy and also the arts.

[00:08:46] But essentially, we start with a core idea that we want to express, you know, for example, point of view that, you know, everybody has their own point of view and not everyone has to be wrong or right.

[00:08:57] Or within the arts this season, we talk about the fact that, you know, sometimes to express yourself, it's best to do it through art, maybe not even telling someone. Maybe you don't feel comfortable talking about something, but you might feel

[00:09:09] comfortable making a movie about it or drawing it. You know, we have episodes about urban planning and the fact that the city is out there trying to make the world a better place for everyone in the community. So we always start with a core idea like that.

[00:09:23] We work really closely with our curriculum advisors. Once we have the core goals for each episode, we sit in a room and brainstorm to how can we make this funny? How can we make this fun?

[00:09:34] And for us and City Island, you know, I always wanted to make it more of an adventure show than a sitcom. So every episode takes place in a different place. It's either a different neighborhood of City Island or we'd have an episode this

[00:09:46] season that's a documentary film about the history of City Island. You see everything from the 1920s all the way up to the 70s. You know, we have episodes that take place in Skytown. It's up in the clouds where they make clouds and rainbows.

[00:09:59] So we always want to change the environment around. We want to change the characters around. So what ends up happening is anytime we change these environments and introduce these new stories, there just ends up being new characters.

[00:10:13] So it's, I, we don't usually say like, okay, let's make a hundred more characters. It just ends up happening that way. When you go up to Skytown, okay, we're going to have to make a paper airplane. We're going to have to have some balloons.

[00:10:24] You're going to have to have a rainbow. We're going to have to have some clouds. So you end up like making up all these characters in support of our core storytelling goals. Now with all these 585 new characters, have you named each one of them?

[00:10:37] Um, they have at least names or temp names that no one's heard. Uh, for example, even today, uh, we had a, uh, we're working on the video game, uh, with you. So we have two video games coming out this year and there was a stick of bubble

[00:10:53] gum and someone's like, Oh, what's, what's his name? And it's gummy bubble men. So it just kind of comes up like that. Everything needs to have a name. Uh, but like I said, some of them, you don't even hear in the show, but I think

[00:11:04] all the characters have at least some level of name. Amazing. How'd you, uh, how did you guys go over the, what was the process of like casting, uh, the voices for these characters? Was there somebody specific you were looking for? Yeah.

[00:11:17] The, well, I think another unique thing about city Island, you know, for PBS kids is that we have, uh, pretty much all adult actors. Um, they're all people that work in, in the comedy improv, um, you know, or in some cases, uh, you know, music or drama world.

[00:11:37] So we have all like, like professional adult actors. Um, they're all incredibly versatile and do a lot of voices. So that was, you know, a very purposeful choice we made because I like to do a lot of improv on the show.

[00:11:51] Uh, I like to play around with the comedy and it was fun to hire people. That to me are like the best comedians out there. People like Camila, but Pornia can meet go Glenn James, uh, uh, James, the third James, a Domian Branson Reese.

[00:12:08] Like these are all people that like are incredibly talented and versatile, versatile voice actors. So what we can do is we can have them voice main characters and then also voice. The countless side characters, like what we've talked about, because every episode

[00:12:23] we may have 30 to 40 speaking parts in three minutes because of the number of times that a cloud says hello or a traffic cone says, Hey, the word on the street is this, or something happens here and there.

[00:12:34] So like, we constantly want to be able to do those jokes where characters are commenting on or making a size. So to do that, we have characters, we have character actors and voice actors that can be versatile enough to do a lot of voices.

[00:12:47] Uh, who were you excited that most when they, when they chose that they wanted to jump on this project? Was there anybody specific you're as soon as you heard they're on, you were. I decided, I'm so, I mean, you know, again, because this is our 25th

[00:13:01] anniversary, I'm getting interviews where people are like, Oh, to what do you owe your longevity? And, you know, I would say it's probably not business acumen. It's really, it's all about surrounding myself with the most talented people that I can find and that I know.

[00:13:16] So the, the, you know, quality of everything I work on is always elevated by the fact that I work with so many incredibly talented people. I work with, you know, an incredibly talented animation director, Katie went and, you know, with Dan Powell, who's, you know, my lead producer

[00:13:32] on the show, he's incredibly talented. And I have a background designer, Jeremy Jousset, who's been my friend since college and he's been designing every show we've ever made. And I think the best work he's ever done is on city Island.

[00:13:43] So the fact that I have so many talented people, it just makes the show better. So, you know, that's like, you know, I will say all of the actors on the show, like it's hard to pick a favorite because they're also good.

[00:13:55] And honestly, our two leads can be in Kimiko are both just, they, they just knock me out every episode. I'm always just so blown away by how much emotion they bring to the characters and how much they think about, you know, what these characters are doing

[00:14:10] and why they're doing it and then why it's being funny, like they never phone it in. And, you know, I'll also add that, you know, one of my friends is Branson Reese and we worked together on a cartoon called Swan Boy.

[00:14:22] So to be able to, you know, we scheduling wise, I was, you know, and he Branson Reese plays Frank light, Frank Lloyd light, which is what's dead. And, you know, the schedule wise every morning for, I think like maybe a month I was recording with, with Branson.

[00:14:38] And it was such a pleasure to just be able to play around and do funny voices with one of my good friends. So just everyone is pretty amazing. And again, James the third is brilliant. And he even wrote episodes with us this season.

[00:14:49] He plays Mark and James Adomian who plays detritus and Mr. Rubric, like I've had James Adomian. I think he's like the, the Mel Blanc of our generation. He's been in every show we've ever done because he's so versatile and does so many

[00:15:03] voices and he loves cartoons so much. So really there's just an incredible amount of talented people. How many, how many shorts are you dropping for season two? Is there a specific number? So we have 10 new music videos and we have 20 new episodes.

[00:15:18] And I'm sure you already have plans for a season three. You're already ahead. I have lots of plans. We love to talk about the show. I'd hear at the studio. So I'm here in Brooklyn.

[00:15:26] We have a studio where everybody comes in every day and we all like to come in and talk about ideas and have creative meetings. And we constantly have meetings where we're just like, what do we want to do next season? So we're always brainstorming that kind of stuff.

[00:15:39] So I have, I call it the candy bag. We have this like dock or we just throw ideas and that could be anything from an episode or a new character or even just gag. So we just like are constantly filling the candy bag.

[00:15:52] And then as soon as then you have to like write up a proposal for season three, I just dip into the candy bag and pull something out. Has there been any talks for any specials go like hour long just to do something down the road?

[00:16:04] I can't say much, but we have a lot of ideas like that. We have some special ideas. We have some ideas for offshoots. We I can say that we're working on two video games right now, which is really

[00:16:16] exciting. One that's going to come out in the next few months. The other that's going to come out before the end of the year. And these are video games where you get the experience of being in City Island or maybe even making your own City Island character.

[00:16:28] That's really, really fun. We have albums planned to come out because the music on the show has been one of the things that we're known for. And we have our again, Surround Yourself with Talented People. It'll make you look better.

[00:16:41] Tunde is our composer and he does not only the theme song for City Island, he does the original score for City Island. He did every original music video. So his song, I tell Tunde that I think his music is the soul of City Island.

[00:16:57] And it's been so important to the show that we're planning two albums that are going to be coming out as well and also merchandise and lots of other things. So luckily, City Island has been well received and we're happy to make more.

[00:17:14] Amazing. Aaron, how can the viewers and listeners that tune in this. I know you said PBS Kids. Is there is it also available on the app? Because I watched it online last night, but how can the viewers get their hands on

[00:17:27] these episodes? The greatest thing about PBS Kids is they make it seen everywhere. So it is really you can watch City Island on most platforms, including you can watch on Amazon. You can watch it on YouTube and the official PBS Kids YouTube site.

[00:17:45] You can watch on the PBS Kids app. You can watch on the PBS Kids gaming app. You can watch it. I think you'd watch it now on Hulu. So wherever you look for City Island, you can see it.

[00:17:55] But I do I will say for this for most people, the quickest way to watch it, especially if you're for kids, check it out on the PBS Kids app. It is the easiest app to get.

[00:18:05] It is a safe, awesome app that has so many great shows, including Sesame Street and Arthur and Odd Squad and all these amazing shows. And I'm so happy to have City Island be a part of it.

[00:18:16] So if you're a kid, check out the PBS Kids app for sure. Watch PBS on TV if you're a kid that still has a TV. But I think for most of the people that are like a little bit older than kids, like

[00:18:29] YouTube's a great way to see it. And it's very easy to find. Just search City Island, PBS, YouTube. Boom, it'll come right up. And you can right now you can watch every episode from season one. You can watch every music video that we've made.

[00:18:43] We've also done a lot of fun compilations as well. And if you're looking to like get news, Instagram is our best spot. If you look at at City Island PBS on Instagram, we try to constantly keep you updated on how to watch things from the show.

[00:18:57] You also see a lot of behind the scenes stuff. We have sketches and, you know, outtakes and all kinds of fun stuff. Amazing. Aaron, I want to thank you for giving me from this today on Pop Culture Unplugged season two of City Island, July 5th, PBS Kids.

[00:19:10] Thank you. This was great. This was awesome. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk about City Island. And if you haven't seen it yet out there, check it out. I'd love to hear what you think and enjoy it.