The snow-capped peaks of South Park, Colorado have been witness to many horrors throughout the 14 seasons of the hit animated series. We’ve seen a headless Britney Spears, the rape of Indiana Jones and the all-powerful Mecha-Streisand. But starting this past March at 10:30pm, South Park viewers have been whisked across the country to a New York City brimming with science-fiction beasts that would kick Mecha-Streisand’s ass.
It’s the setting for Ugly Americans, the new Comedy Central series created by Devin Clark that conjures a melting pot city filled with unspeakable ingredients. We meet vampires, demons, werewolves and aliens, but there’s also another horror lurking throughout the show – the beast of bureaucracy. You see, the central character is Mark Lilly, a social worker at the Department of Integration, which is the first and often last refuge of the squids, worm-creatures and talking trees that arrive in this gruesome Gotham.
After gestating the concept online, Clark developed the series with David M. Stern (The Simpsons, Monk), who also served as an EP on the project. Clark and Stern then turned to two animation studios to bring the show to life. First on the job was Augenblick Studios (Superjail!), appropriately based on Brooklyn, for development and pre-production, and then the majority of the Flash animation was produced at Cuppa Coffee Studios (Glenn Martin, DDS) in Toronto.
With the first batch of episodes under his belt, Clark took some time to answer a few questions for CHF, and below that we quiz Augenblick Studios founder Aaron Augenblick.
SIMPSON: Huge congrats on the new series. A big premiere back in March, positive reviews and now the additional episode order for October 2010.
CLARK: I feel amazingly lucky to get the opportunity to have one of my ideas brought to life; and to have so many fantastic, creative and smart people helping. But it’s funny, I’ve been so caught up in production, so busy, sometimes I feel like I don’t even get an opportunity to get excited about how big a deal it is. So, only recently, I’ve been like “Oh, this is a show I made. It’s on air. Holy cow.”
SIMPSON: Take us back to before the Atom.com deal.
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