Drinky the Crow began his life in Tony Millionaire’s bleak-but-hilarious comic strip Maakies, which is syndicated in newspapers like The Village Voice, the Chicago Reader and Seattle’s The Stranger. Whether or not this makes Adult Swim the LA Weekly of television I don’t know, but the new TV series The Drinky Crow Show is definitely not ready for prime time. Let’s see why:
The show features buckets full of gunplay, blood, suicide, vomiting, incest and, of course, drinking – which ain’t for everyone. 
If the grotesque and gratitious is for you, aim your remote control at Adult Swim at 12:45 AM on Sunday nights. If not, maybe you should go watch another episode of Ghost Whisperer.
While the subject matter pushes the limits, there’s surely nothing grotesque about the production values of the series, which may be remembered as one of the shows that helped push CG animation art direction to new heights. Challenged with keeping Millionaire’s detailed inking style in tact, the Mirari Films crew brought an aesthetic to CG that we’ve rarely (if ever) seen before – what Millionaire calls “a Sunday newspaper comic come to life.” The show doesn’t “wow” us with exceptional character animation or acting prowess (are you familiar with Adult Swim’s anemic budgets?), but the look and feel surely made me rethink what a CG show can look like.
We are now joined by co-creators Tony Millionaire and Eric Kaplan (who also runs Mirari Films) for an few sobering questions.
AARON SIMPSON: What about the The Drinky Crow Show makes it a fit for Adult Swim?
TONY MILLIONAIRE: It’s a show about a drunken crow and a monkey who often gets sexually abused, so it wasn’t right for Nickelodeon. The good thing about Adult Swim is that they insist on extreme experimentalism. It’s very refreshing to hear an editor say, “Can you please make this more weird?”
ERIC KAPLAN: It’s an adult show, so it lets us deal with themes of death and sexuality and religion that kids are not ready for (or which the adults who make decisions believe kids are not ready for) but it also looks like a kid’s cartoon, so it aims to gives us the pleasure we remember as kids watching TV. I think that’s very much the territory Adult Swim works in.
AARON SIMPSON: How did you two meet?
ERIC: I had just started/acquired Mirari Films and was looking for cartoonists interested in developing their work for animation. Peter Bagge put me in touch with Tony.
TONY: Adult Swim had approached me about developing a show based on my weekly strip Maakies, and after a lot of back and forth I thought it would fizzle into nothingness. Along came Eric and together with Nick Weidenfeld at Adult Swim, the project plowed forward.
AARON: Tony, have you always seen animation as a natural evolution from your comic strips?
TONY: No, but I’ve always had it in the back of my mind. I’ve had a love of newspaper comics since the first time I’d ever seen Peanuts. My grandfather was an illustrator who had wanted to be a cartoonist. His friends were Roy Crane and Les Turner, who did the strip Captain Easy back in the 30’s. I loved the old Popeye cartoons, so I guess I’ll change my answer to yes.
AARON: Drinky and Maakie’s path to Adult Swim involved several different animated efforts. When was the decisions made to switch from 2D to the CGI route, and why?
TONY: The first time Maakies was animated was for Saturday Night Live. It was done with After Effects by Marc Alt. He did a great job on a small budget, I really liked those cartoons. The voices were done by Adam McKay, Andy Richter, and the Thyre sisters, Becky and Sarah. The theme song was by The Human Lard Dog. We made six cartoons, but they only aired two of them. I thought the last four were the funniest, but funny to some means something else to others, so who knows what happened? For the Adult Swim cartoons I really wanted to have a flat 2D look, but using CG. CG gives you the fluidity of an old Popeye cartoon, but I’m not crazy about that shiny Noddy look. I wanted to make something that looked like a Sunday newspaper comic come to life. So we wrapped my drawings and textures onto CG models and after a lot of back and forth came up with this new look we call Maakimation.
AARON: Let’s watch one of the first animated episodes – Clam Shack.
AARON: Eric, how does this production effort differ from a show like Futurama?
ERIC: At Futurama I was a writer/producer. I gave notes on boards and animatics and so forth, but there was definitely the feeling that the animation was a different department. The animators would come, we’d give notes and then they’d go home and do them, whether or not they thought they were a good idea. Futurama was a good show and there was cameraderie, so on the whole I think they did. On Drinky Crow the comments go back and forth much more freely, because I wear two hats — I’m both writer/executive producer and head of the animation studio, which is Mirari Films. So I’m writing with an eye to what will look great once it’s animated, and guiding the studio to solve technical production issues that I know will come up creatively.
AARON: Tony, is there a character in the show you identify with most?
TONY: Absolutely not, I identify with all of them equally, even the duck-billed platypus in episode 10. If I’m drawing a strip about my feelings as a drunk, I speak through Drinky Crow. If I’m drawing about my feelings as a worthless bumbling idiot, I speak through Uncle Gabby. I’ve been able over the years to use the strip as a kind of diary, expressing all my sick thoughts, hopes and despair through various comic characters. The show is an extension of that, but with more graphic vomiting.
AARON: What type of feedback did you see from the original Adult Swim pilot screening during the Night of 1,000 Pilots?
ERIC: They were very taken with the little fly inside Gabby’s wound who said to his wife “I have cancer.” So they encouraged us to explore non-linear story-teling — having stories take unexepcted turns into different universes or realms of narrative.
TONY: The fans wrote in like a horde of drunken lemmings begging for a cliff to jump off of. They begged us for more, but better and funnier. So we obliged. We also gave them more gut-wrenching horror and gore.
AARON: Do you find yourselves self-censoring the content you put in the show, or do you leave that to the network?
ERIC: I don’t consciously self-censor, but there may be an unconscious module in my brain doing it. I think comedy trades on some of the release of emotional energy around taboo material, but you have to treat it the right way so that the release actually comes and it’s funny.
TONY: Sometimes I cringe or make other faces when I think of some of the things that come into my own mind, but I leave it to others to decide whether or not it’s too disgusting.
AARON: We now turn to Matt Danner, who….. Matt, what digital trickery did you employ to blend the 2D and 3D elements into a seamless world?
MATT DANNER: It was a steady diet of Adobe mixed with heaping helping of Maya. All the storyboards were done in Photoshop. The animatics were timed and posed out in Flash and then exported with After Effects. While the character animation was being done in Maya, the backgrounds were all produced 2D in Photoshop. Then animated 2D effects were added from Flash. Finally the whole enchilada was composited in Shake!
It’s really a 2 1/2D show. 
Great interview.
And I love this show.
very very nice side…
The best Dildo Drecksweiber
goodbye