Superhero ticks all the boxes
The Tick’s Ben Edlund and Griffin Newman tell why the time was right to bring back the cult figure.
Ben Edlund admits this latest attempt to bring back The Tick could have resulted in a ‘‘s...fest’’. The creator of the nigh-invulnerable superhero in the figure-hugging Neon blue costume confesses that while it was always tempting to resurrect his charge for a second live-action series so he could ‘‘play with the superhero toybox of the 21st century’’, a rushed job could have resulted in an unnecessary blot on his beloved 30 year old character’s history.
Fortunately, Amazon Prime was more than happy to give him the time he needed to get things right.
‘‘I was given two-and-a-half years to develop this,’’ the nearly 50-year-old cartoonist says of the 10-part series, which recently debuted worldwide on the streaming service.
‘‘This period of research and development was very trying creatively, but it led to some delicate engineering. We needed a lot a time because balancing absurdist humour with superhero tropes could have lead to a s…fest.’’
Edlund, who has worked on cult TV shows like Firefly, Gotham and Supernatural, says he couldn’t have been happier working with his new paymasters.
‘‘You often hear that that the producers want a project to be creative driven, or to have authenticity, and you go, ‘oh well, that’s a nice thing to hear’, but in the case of Amazon it actually turned out to be the truth. It has been an amazing experience.’’
Of course, one of the biggest challenges was finding a new actor to play the eponymous superhero essayed by Patrick Warburton in the previous series back in 2001-02.
‘‘It was daunting to kind of step out into the process of casting The Tick,’’ admits Edlund, ‘‘just because there are a lot of factors that have to be satisfied. The actor has to have a lot of comedic depths, be able to carry and develop an interior life to a very peculiar cipher – and he needs to be 6ft 5 (195.5cm). Then you’ve got to take all of those things and put a mask on them that they never take off.’’
Amazingly they found an actor who fitted the bill perfectly – British comedian Peter Serafinowicz.
Best known in America for scenestealing roles in the likes of Spy and Guardians of the Galaxy, the 45-yearold Liverpudlian has also done a lot of writing, directing and producing back in his homeland.
‘‘We in the US weren’t aware of the full breadth of his work,’’ enthuses
"I think he's made The Tick scarier and given him a childlike innocence. I always think The Tick is like playing superheroes on the playground." Griffin Newman about his co-star Peter Serafinowicz
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Four-part 2016 series, which sees the British comedian setting off on a 6500-kilometre journey to explore the most famous trade route in history. He travels from Xi’an, China, to Istanbul, Turkey, to uncover a series of remarkable locations, mysteries and hidden gems, many unknown to the Western world. Edlund. ‘‘He’s done a lot of things that carry their own comedic weight and he’s got sensibilities that I’m happy to get involved with. You can almost describe him in yoghurt terms – he’s got a lot of culture going on.’’
It’s an assessment that Serafinowicz’s onscreen sidekick Arthur Everest (Vinyl‘s Griffin Newman) concurs with.
‘‘I could not like him more – believe me, I tried. We were cast quite a bit apart and I didn’t meet him until the night before the table read. You don’t know if you’re going to get along with someone, if you’re going to play well together. But we’re very lucky we have similar brains in very different bodies [Newman is 170cm]. We have very similar ideas about what we like and how we like to work and we both taking acting very seriously, but come from a comedy background.’’
Newman, a self-confessed Tick expert (‘‘It was a good thing I got this part because otherwise I’d have all this useless knowledge and nowhere to apply it’’.), says he believes there are two things Serafinowicz has added to the character which hark back to the original comics.
‘‘I think he’s made The Tick scarier and given him a childlike innocence. I always think The Tick is like playing superheroes on the playground.’’
For his own part, Newman was impressed at the level of effects work on the show.
‘‘I’ve worked on too many projects where somebody has talked up a big game of what they are going to do, only for the shot in the real car to turn into me sitting on a bucket. So I was constantly impressed how, against the odds, we were able to realise everything we wanted to.’’
Edlund was particularly impressed that they were finally able to make Arthur fly.
‘‘We’d previously shied away from that. I took great delight in suspending things from parts of Griffin’s body that he didn’t expect,’’ he chuckles.
‘‘In truth, we were able to do a lot of things we weren’t able to do before this ‘age of the superhero’. In the previous live action show, we had to swing the camera away a lot more frequently.’’
And while delighted to have The Dark Knight trilogy director of photography Wally Pfister calling the between trying to create a more cinematic story from Catton’s book and remaining true to her prose.
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onset shots, Edlund admits it was because of the oversaturation of serious superheroes that he thought the time was right for The Tick to reappear.
‘‘I definitely think that what’s happened in the mainstream superhero world has called The Tick back into service.’’
As The Tick himself says in the trailer, ‘‘What the world needs now – is us.’’
is now streaming in New Zealand on Amazon Prime.
The Tick through the memories of the people who played a part in it. A million people lined the streets of London for the funeral procession, while 2.5 billion watched on television around the world
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