Kappa Mikey

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Kappa Mikey began not in a television studio but in a toy company. Larry Schwarz was working at Rumpus Toys, a toy design firm in New York City, when he first conceived the show in 2000. What he imagined was a cartoon unlike anything on American television: a story about an American actor so out of place that his own visual style clashes with everyone around him. The central question the series posed was deceptively simple. What happens when a character drawn in thick-line American cartoon style lands inside a world built from Japanese anime? The answer would take years to reach audiences, and the path there was anything but direct.

• 2. From Toys to Television

  ›

  In September 2001, Rumpus Toys and Sunbow Entertainment formed a partnership to develop the project. By May 2002, Noggin, a channel owned by MTV Networks, had picked it up for a teen programming block called The N. The deal gave Noggin and The N co-development status, while Animation Collective kept the copyright and distribution rights. That arrangement looked settled until something shifted. The N had moved away from animation toward live-action programming for young adults. Kappa Mikey no longer fit there, so the show was transferred to Nicktoons Network, another MTV Networks-owned channel and a sister station to Noggin. The move made history: Kappa Mikey became the first half-hour series to premiere exclusively on Nicktoons Network. The series was then adjusted to suit Nicktoons' younger audience rather than the teens The N had been targeting.

  Animation Collective, Schwarz's own production company, carried the show through every step. Unlike many cartoons of that period, the studio retained ownership rather than handing it to an agency. Animation was not outsourced, and episodes were written by full-time staff. Pre-production began in 2002, animation started in the summer of 2005, and production wrapped in September 2007. All of this happened in New York City, with voice work recorded at NYAV Post in Manhattan, a studio owned by voice actor Michael Sinterniklaas, who also played the lead character.

• 3. The Deliberate Visual Clash

  ›

  Every creative decision in the animation came back to one idea: the contrast had to be visible at a glance. The series was animated in Adobe Flash, with additional CGI rendered in Maya. Two separate groups of animators worked on the show simultaneously. One group handled the anime-style characters; the other was solely responsible for Mikey and the other American characters. That division was not logistical, it was artistic.

  Mikey's appearance is described as rendered in a thick-line, pop-graphic, American cartoon style. His co-stars, by contrast, perform with large comedic face faults, a technique from anime where a face or body shifts into an exaggerated expression or shrinks to emphasize a reaction. The show also deployed other anime conventions: the sweat drop, flaming eyes, lines over the eyes, and oversized heads. One of the show's running gags was Mikey attempting these same gestures and failing, unable to do them because he was drawn in a different visual language.

  Vehicles, weapons, and large set pieces like the Gonard balloon and the Pirate King's ship were modeled in Maya and brought into Flash using a tool called the Toon Filter. Backgrounds were also built in Maya, then finished with texture and detail in Photoshop. Some of those backgrounds were based on actual locations in Tokyo. The instrumental score was composed by John Angier, who also wrote the lyrics to several songs including "The Recycling Song" and the songs from "The Karaoke Episode".

• 4. Mikey Simon and the LilyMu Cast

  ›

  Mikey Simon, voiced by Michael Sinterniklaas, is nineteen years old and plays the superhero lead of a tokusatsu show called LilyMu. Off set, he has a childish sense of humor, which generates most of the friction in a typical episode. Each episode follows a formula: the cast begins filming a LilyMu segment, something goes wrong, a conflict emerges, the characters work through it, and the LilyMu scene is finally filmed successfully a second time, often rewritten to incorporate whatever lesson the episode explored.

  The LilyMu cast is a deliberate catalog of anime archetypes. Gonard, voiced by Sean Schemmel, plays the show's main antagonist on screen, a purple-skinned blue-haired humanoid bent on destruction, but in real life he is sweet-natured and obsessed with sandwiches. Mitsuki, voiced by Evelyn Lanto, plays the headstrong bad girl on LilyMu and carries a crush on Mikey off set. Lily, voiced by Kether Donohue, plays the damsel in distress but is in reality a temperamental and self-centered actress who was LilyMu's original star before Mikey was hired. Guano, voiced by Gary Mack, both stars in and directs LilyMu; his on-screen character is a direct parody of Pikachu, down to speaking only his own name. In a Christmas episode, Guano is revealed to be the long-lost son of Ozu, the LilyMu producer, while in costume.

  Ozu, voiced by Stephen Moverly, is the temperamental owner of LilyMu who holds various properties around Tokyo. Completing his inner circle is Yes Man, voiced by Jesse Adams, a hyperactive servant who agrees with everything Ozu says and is rarely seen apart from him.

• 5. The World Beyond the Set

  ›

  Recurring characters gave the show a texture that extended past the LilyMu soundstage. Speed Racer appears as an older, androgynous version of the famous animated racer, serving as a limousine driver for the LilyMu team in the theme song and pilot. Despite having the body of a middle-aged man, the character has eyelashes and a deep feminine voice like that of a young boy. That combination of contradictions was a recurring strategy: the show assembled familiar anime references and then distorted them.

  The Dancing Sushi, small sushi characters who appear as scene transitions and bumpers, had their three main members named Larry, after Larry Schwarz, Roro, and Salmon. A female sushi character named Meep was added to round out the cast for their spin-off. Socky, a sock puppet voiced by Adam Moreno, functions as a pop icon and Tokyo celebrity, serving as spokesperson for Hitoshi Beauty Cream and rival to Lily for a spot on Tokyo Trend's Top 50 Most Beautiful list. Over time, Socky became one of LilyMu's most persistent antagonists.

  Among the recurring antagonists with longer arcs is Dr. Takashi Katashi, voiced by Wayne Grayson, a doctor who accidentally enlarges a pimple on Mikey, performs plastic surgery on Socky, and in a later episode steals Ozu's retainer, which is also a family heirloom, intending to sell it for a green sports car.

• 6. Spin-Off and Merchandise

  ›

  Dancing Sushi, the spin-off series built around the bumper characters, was produced from October 2007 to December 2007. It was designed to give fans of Kappa Mikey more of those characters while also keeping animators employed during the gap between projects. Speed Racer: The Next Generation was going into production soon afterward, and the spin-off served as a bridge. Unlike the main series, Dancing Sushi contained no dialogue. The sushi characters were voiced by people already involved with Kappa Mikey, including John Angier, the series composer.

  In April 2005, 4Kids Entertainment was named the exclusive licensing agent for the series. A DVD was released on the 18th of September 2007 under the Starz Home Entertainment label, collecting three first-season episodes alongside bonus material including a fictional music video for a song called "I'm Alright" from the episode "Battle of the Bands", a tutorial on how to draw Mikey, and an interactive game that parodied Hollywood Squares. A second DVD intended to collect the entire first season was announced in 2008 through the Animation Collective website but was later removed from the site without explanation. As of 2009, that release remained shelved. Both seasons were also made available for download through iTunes before eventually being removed from the platform.